[Siguse-l] Impact of the web on user's mental models of OPAC's

[Tom Burton-West]

Hello,

Web search engines have now been available for a long enough time that it may be that a significant number of OPAC users are coming to the OPAC with an assumption that a web-based OPAC will work like a web search engine. For example one of our users came to the reference desk asking why a search in which he put the search terms in quotations (a web search engine convention to indicate phrase searching), did not appear to be working correctly.  Our OPAC simply stripped off the quotes and did a boolean  "AND" keyword search instead of a phrase search.

To the extent that web based OPACs do not work like web search engines, an erroneous mental model of how the OPAC works can cause various user errors and search problems.

Does anyone know of any research done on the extent to which users try to use a mental model based on how web search engines work when they use OPACs?

Tom

Tom Burton-West
Senior Applications Systems Analyst /Systems Librarian
Library Information Systems
Getty Research Institute
(310)440-7410
TBurtonwest at getty.edu