[Sigcr-l] Survey

[Leonard Will]

In message <p06002001be9af4cc9a0f@[24.55.39.8]> on Sun, 1 May 2005, 
Marcia  J. Bates <mjbates at ucla.edu> wrote
>Dear Sarit,
>       You have certainly found an unusual way to do your research. And 
>I don't know what question or hypothesis you are studying. I worry 
>about the quality of the data you will receive. People may define 
>browsing in many different ways.

Yes, and it seems to me that the times you want will be very dependent 
on how people record results. You say

>>A. The shelf browsing - the length of time from entering the library 
>>until the list of the retrieved publications is complete.
>>B. The catalog browsing - the length of time from starting the catalog 
>>browsing until the list of the retrieved publications is complete.

This will depend a lot on how people create the lists. If they have to 
examine each item, check for relevance, decide on its author and title 
and write that down, some people will take a lot longer to do that than 
others. If the catalogue allows you to print a list of the retrieved 
items, it will be much quicker than manually transcribing information 
from books on the shelf, but the "5 relevant pages" test will not be 
possible..

Leonard Will
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