When I asked about welfare policy, Pataki told me an anecdote about a young black man who had wandered into his legislative office in Peekskill. The young man, it turned out, had been a heroin addict and had kicked the habit, gone on welfare, and then been forced into a job as part of a workfare program. "All of a sudden he said to himself, 'Hey, I got some work. I'm a great guy. I can make something of myself,' Pataki recalled. (Traub, 1996)
What's wrong with the anecdote above? It's a great story: it emphasizes the kind of success that we'd like to see become commonplace for all individuals in our society. But that's the problem: it specifies an ideal outcome and implies that it should (or could) be the norm. In other words: "If he can do it, anyone can."
Sadly, not everyone does his/her utmost in performing the tasks and duties of life -- or even things that some of us would regard as "fun" This human tendency ("The Principle of Least Effort," as G.H. Zipf called it), predicts that most people, most of the time, are turned back by modest hurdles that they know could be overcome, with effort. To be habitual, an action must be relatively effortless or carry a particularly large psychic reward. And in what constitutes a "large reward," opinions and motivations vary widely across individuals.
I've chosen a political anecdote in order to be provocative. (I'm not picking on George Pataki; when I sat down to write this paper I reflected on what I had read that week and immediately recalled Pataki's story--demonstrating the pervasiveness of such anecdotes.) The point is not political but rather social: it is a natural thing for us to rationalize our way out of the hard work of finding solutions to thorny problems; it is easy to assume that individual initiative will make up for what we have not done as designers of systems; such rationalizations are often faulty.
The purpose of the anecdote is to draw an analogy between addressing social problems and designing computer applications and their interfaces, and hence to addressing usability problems with information-seeking in electronic environments. Along the way I'll briefly describe some things we know about information-seeking in physical libraries.
I could begin by supplying many anecdotes about interface design, but they've already been better articulated by researchers like Tom Landauer (1995). I refer to problems like "armchair naming" of commands and index terms, lack of testing of system features, emphasis on marketing over evaluation -- all of the problems that result in poor usability in computer applications.
There is a parallel problem in research and development concerning information-seeking in everyday life. The problem is that exemplary information behavior -- meaning systematic, rigorous and exhaustive searches for information--are often assumed to be common among people who make a living with information. We know now, from many studies of scientists, engineers, social scientists, managers, and even reference librarians, that optimized searches for information are uncommon. Instead, most of us satisfice rather than optimize; we make efficient (if not always effective) use of nearby human resources before turning to authoritative printed (or electronic) sources. We usually settle for less than complete, authoritative information. This is even more true of the public than it is of workers in the professions.
The general public make little use of formal information and limited use of electronic systems. Neuman (1985) reports that average usage of "reference" material (e.g., phone books, cookbooks, catalogs, encyclopedias, fact books, and books of quotations) by members of the public amounts to only 35 seconds per day. The public (including schoolchildren) tend to be passive and entertainment-oriented; newspaper reading--a common venue for the seeking of factual information --is a daily habit for a only minority of adults, and the papers themselves are less than 10% "hard news," according to Neuman.
Electronic information-seeking is no more popular than seeking information on paper. Information retrieval studies have shown that even scientists and engineers tend to use the old, Boolean-operator style of retrieval engines poorly (e.g., Case, Borgman and Meadow, 1986). The Office of Technology Assessment recently reported that most scientists on the Internet are using it for little more than electronic mail (Anderson, 1993, p. 1065).
As we move into digital libraries for the public it is clear that the barriers to usage must be made even lower. In surveys on specific electronic functions conducted by the Gallup polling organization in 1994 (Interactive Age 1994, 1995), the results show low levels of sophistication among adults. While nearly 55% of those surveyed had access to a computer at home, school or office, less than 27% of those respondents with access used online services (i.e., less than 15% of the U.S. population); of those not currently using online services, 93% had no intention of doing so. Despite apparent popularity and fierce competition among commercial information utilities (such as American Online) and the presence of large public information systems operating in Europe for more than a decade (e.g., Minitel; see Case, 1994) we do not seem to have discovered the key to making information utilities that are both usable by, and appealing to, a majority of the population.
In summary, we must do much better at making digital libraries conform to what we know about information-seeking: that it is easily discouraged, frequently sub-optimal, and best facilitated by other people rather than the original sources of (textual) information. Therefore I have the following suggestions regarding further research and development on information-seeking in digital libraries:
Case, D. (1994). The Social Shaping of Videotex: How Information Services for the Public Have Evolved. J. American Society for Information Science, 45 , 483-497.
Case, D., Borgman, C. & Meadow, C. (1986). End-user Information-seeking in the Energy Field: Implications for End-user Access to DOE/RECON Databases. Info. Proc. & Man., 22(4), 299-308.
Interactive Age. (1994). Interactive Age & Gallup Consumer Study. Interactive Age 2 (5), 62.
Interactive Age. (1995). Interactive Age & Gallup Consumer Study. Interactive Age 2 (6), 64.
Landauer, T. (1995). The Trouble with Computers: Usefulness, Usability, and Productivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Neuman, W. R. (1985). The Media Habit. In Electronic Publishing Plus, edited by Martin Greenberger. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Traub, James. (1996). Dollface. The New Yorker, January 15, pp. 28-35.
Zipf, G.H. (1949). Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort; an Introduction to Human Ecology. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley.