[SigLT-L] Best JASIST Paper Award winner

[Janet Arth]

Just in case you missed this in the awards posting to ASIS-L or at the
Annual Conference, here is information about the Wiley Best JASIST Paper
Award winner, which is quite relevant to LT members that are involved in
library search and discovery:

Max L. Wilson, M.C. Schraefel, Ryen W. White.  Evaluating advanced search
interfaces using established information-seeking models. Journal of the
American Society for Information Science and Technology 60(7):1407-1422.

DOI: 10.1002/asi.21080

Article Abstract

When users have poorly defined or complex goals, search interfaces that
offer only keyword-searching facilities provide inadequate support to help
them reach their information-seeking objectives. The emergence of interfaces
with more advanced capabilities, such as faceted browsing and result
clustering, can go some way toward addressing such problems. The evaluation
of these interfaces, however, is challenging because they generally offer
diverse and versatile search environments that introduce overwhelming
amounts of independent variables to user studies; choosing the interface
object as the only independent variable in a study would reveal very little
about why one design outperforms another. Nonetheless, if we could
effectively compare these interfaces, then we would have a way to determine
which was best for a given scenario and begin to learn why. In this article,
we present a formative inspection framework for the evaluation of advanced
search interfaces through the quantification of the strengths and weaknesses
of the interfaces in supporting user tactics and varying user conditions.
This framework combines established models of users and their needs and
behaviors to achieve this. The framework is applied to evaluate three search
interfaces and demonstrates the potential value of this approach to
interactive information retrieval evaluation.

Award
The award cited three particularly noteworthy aspects.  One of which was a
literature review with a synthesis of information seeking behaviors and
another was description of an evaluation framework for advanced
search/faceted browsing applications.  The award also noted that the paper
is "clear, direct and understandable, and the argument and empirical content
are well delineated."

The full award abstract is here:
http://www.asis.org/asist2010/bestjasistpaper.html

       ~  ~  ~  ~
Janet M. Arth, Systems Librarian
University of Minnesota Libraries Enterprise Technology
499 Wilson Library (mail)
569 Wilson Library (office)
309-19th Avenue South    email: arth at umn.edu
Minneapolis, MN              phone: 612-624-9860
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