L503 User Needs and Behavior in Theory and Practice

Learning Guide
Prepared by
Jean Umiker-Sebeok and Kim Gregson
School of Library and Information Science
Indiana University - Bloomington
Created Fall, 1996; Revised Aug., 1998

Information Retrieval

The vending machine metaphor of Information Retrieval (IR)
Information Retrieval as a discursive "move" in sense-making
Instruction and online help
Bibliography

The Vending Machine metaphor of Information Retrieval (IR)

The term Information Retrieval is one of those terms in LIS (yes, another one!) which is used by different people with varying meanings. In the dominant meaning in the field, the term refers to the process by which a person interacts with a system which contains representations of collected information objects in order to extract a list of items which may prove useful in satisfying some information need. The person retrieves these representations and makes judgments about whether the objects they represent will or will not be pertinent in answering his or her question. (Harter, cited in Hert 1996, calls this "weak relevance" judgment because it is not based on the information object itself, only its surrogate.)

If the information objects themselves are available through the system in question, e.g., in a system where the full text of articles is given, as on the World Wide Web or in full-text databases, the user may use the system's representation to determine its probable relevance of the object but then also "retrieve" the document in order to judge its relevance (= a "strong relevance" judgment).

The systems given the most attention in LIS research on IR are traditional card catalogs, commercial information retrieval systems such as DIALOG or Medline, and a library Online Public Access Systems.

The study of information retrieval in the above sense of the term is often considered to be the cornerstone of the entire LIS edifice, although proponents of IR research have to contend with equally adamant promoters of Bibliometrics, on the one hand, and Organization and Representation, on the other.

Here's an interesting experiment: Try asking each of your SLIS instructors what is the "core" of LIS theory. I did this recently, at a national meeting, and was told -- in all seriousness -- that it was IR, by a person who does IR research, OR, by someone in OR studies, and Bibliometrics , by someone in Bibliometrics. But try it yourself, because you will get very interesting insights into the field when your respondents explain why they take the position that they do.

Unfortunately, the above usage of the term implies the systems-oriented approach we discussed early in this course, seeing the user and his or her needs wholly from the point of view of interactions with the system.

I call this the vending machine metaphor of IR because the system is seen as "storing" bits of information, like snack foods or beverages, which may be "retrieved" by having the customer punch the relevant combination of descriptor buttons (for author, title and subject) (= the user query).

Studies based on this metaphor typically start when the user approaches the machine and end when the user leaves it, even when the researcher purports to be interested in the context of the search. Studies of usage of these machines focus on:

the customer's goals?what they hope to get out of the machine, e.g., coffee or tea; articles or monographs for a research paper

the customer's semantic and syntactic knowledge ? knowing what the buttons stand for (e.g., decaf vs. regular; title vs. subject access) and what are the rules for combining buttons (e.g., coffee with milk but NOT soup with milk; surname of author followed by given name but NOT given name followed by surname)

the customer's technical skills in executing a query? e.g., inserting a coin, punching the right sequence of buttons, etc.; submitting a query, narrowing the query, etc.;

the outcome?whether or not the customer judges the items retrieved to meet their needs (e.g., the coffee is hot; the articles are "relevant").

Most of the widely-used IR systems we currently have are based on the vending machine metaphor of IR.

Information Retrieval as a Discursive "Move" in Sense-Making

Borgman and Beaulieu (1996: 491) note that "research continues to show that [online public access] systems are ineffective and hard to use". Borgman (1996) attributes this to the fact that the systems are designed without "sufficient understanding of searching behavior" (p. 493). All of this week's required readings point to this need to redefine IR from the wider point of view of the entire sense making process.

Systems need to be redesigned to take into account the following aspects of the sense making process:

The search process may be iterative, while current IR systems assume that a session is self contained and independent.

The search process may be aimed at "refining a question rather than building a set of documents that matches an explicit query" (Borgman 1996: 493). The search process may involve searchers who cannot be specific because they do not know precisely what they want.

The search process may involve different information technologies and sources, both online and off-line, rather than just the one system.

Searchers often come to the search with incomplete information about the access points common to IR systems (author, title, and subject).

The search process often involves collaborative projects.

Searchers want to control the search process.

Characteristics of systems which could address these features of information searching include:

They must "support question answering rather than simply query matching" (Borgman 1996: 494). To do this, the system must help the user translate an "information need into a searchable query" (p. 495). Various approaches have been taken to doing this.

Bates 1990 notes that the main emphasis in research has tended to be in automating the search process, i.e., giving the system more control over the process. She proposes, rather, that systems be redesigned so as to help searchers control and develop better searches. Rather than having the system take over the search by fully automating it, she advocates providing users with the means of directing the search by incorporating strategic behaviors normally associated with information searching into the user interface. Feedback could be provided the searcher, throughout the search, suggesting types of strategic moves or tactics which might be helpful.

The "Computerized Personal Librarian Assistant" system proposed in Mathe & Chen 1994 is an example of an adaptive interactive system. It also aims at supporting question answering rather than simple query matching. It also assumes that, if information relevant to the individual user's context is provided the searcher, the search will be facilitated. Rather than providing feedback on the strategic moves available, however, it interactively learns contextual relevance during information retrieval and incrementally adapts retrieved information to individual user profiles. As users provide feedback on relevance -- in a simple, non-distracting way --, the system gradually builds a relevance network for the individual user profiles as well as for groups of users, which can then be used at other times, in other searches. It also allows the user to control the process, by deciding when to provide relevance feedback and when to use the adaptive learning capability of the system. Users may also select the kinds of filters -- tasks or users -- they wish to have used for a search.

One of the advantages of such a learning by observation system is that it does not rely on either a large amount of a priori knowledge about users (user models) to be stored in the computer's knowledge base (canonical user modeling approaches), nor does it require establishment of the underlying information structure of the application domain.

They must allow the user to "retain fragments of prior search strategies and recombine them in other ways, to pursue non-linear links in the database, or to explore by other means." (Borgman 1996: 494). The Ariadne system described in the earlier reading by Twidale et al. (1995) would make it possible for searchers to retain a record of their search and revise the search. See also the Mathe & Chen system and its relevance network.

They must allow users to browse authority files and indexes outside the constraints of a specific query; cf. the system advocated by Johnson and Cochrane 1995.

They must work with other systems; cf. the system proposed in Mathe & Chen 1994.

They must permit collaboration among individuals; cf. the Mathe & Chen system, where collaborators can share relevance adaptations. The Ariadne system is also aimed at permitting the searcher to share his or her search description with human intermediaries.

Instruction and Online Help

Borgman (1996) notes that, in the short term, instruction and online help for IR could be improved by seeing that all aspects of information searching are covered rather than the usual technical and semantic skills now emphasized. Searchers need help with the conceptual skills involved in IR. However, instruction and online help should not be used as a substitute for designing systems which are "intuitive" and "require a minimum of instruction" (p. 501).

Bibliography

Allen, Bryce (1994) Cognitive abilities and information system usability. Information Processing & Management 30(2): 177-191.

Allen, Robert B. (1990) User models: Theory, method, and practice. Int. J. Man-Machine Studies 32: 511-543.

Barry, C. L. (1994) User defined relevance criteria: An exploratory study. JASIS45(3): 149-159.

Bates, M.J. (1990) Where should the person stop and the information search interface start? Information Processing & Management 26(5): 575-591.

Beaulieu, Micheline and Christine L. Borgman (1996) A new era ofr OPAC research: Introduction to special topic issue on current research in online public access systems. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 47 (7): 491-492.

Beaulieu, M. and C.L. Borgman (eds.) (1996) Current Research in Online Public Access Systems. JASIS 47(7).

Borgman, Christine L. (1985) The user's mental model of an information retrieval system. Research and Development in Information Retrieval: Eighth Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference, pp. 268-273. New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery. (6 pp.)

Borgman, Christine L. (1996) Why are online catalogs still hard to use? JASIS 47(7): 493-503.

Bruce, Harry W. (1994) A cognitive view of the situational dynamism of user-centered relevance estimation. JASIS 45(3): 142-148.

Chang, Shan-Ju and Ronald E. Rice (1993) Browsing: A multidimensional framework. ARIST 28.

Choo, Chun Wei and Ethel Auster (1993) Environmental scanning: Acquisition and use of information by managers. ARIST 28.

Cronin, Blaise and Carol A. Hert (1995) Scholarly foraging and network discovery tools. J. of Documentation 51(4): 388-403.

Hert, Carol A. (1996a) User goals on an online public access catalog. JASIS 47(7): 504-518.

Hert, Carol A. (1997) What do we know about user behavior on information retrieval systems?, ch. 2 inUnderstanding Information Retrieval Interactions: Theoretical and Practical Implications. New York: Ablex. [in press]

Johnson, Eric H. and Pauline A. Cochrane (1995) A hypertextual interface for a searcher's thesaurus. Digital Libraries '95: 2nd Annual Conference on the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (15 pp.).

Marchionini, Gary (1995) Information Seeking in Electronic Environments. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Mathe, Nathalie and James Chen (1994) A user-centered approach to adaptive hypertext based on an information relevance model. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on User Modeling 9UM '94), Hyannis, MA, August, 1994, pp. 107-114.

Norman, D. A. (1986) Cognitive engineering. In D. A. Norman and S. W. Draper (eds.), User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction, pp. 31-61. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Park, Taemin Kim (1993) The nature of relevance in information retrieval: An empirical study. Library Quarterly 63(3): 318-351.

Schamber, Linda (1994) Relevance and information behavior. ARIST 29.

Sugimoto, Shigeo et al. (1995) Enhancing usability of network-based library information system s- Experimental studies of a user interface for OPAC and of a collaboration tool for library services. Digital Libraries '95: 2nd Annual Conference on the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries

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