Information Seeking Behaviour
Submitted by tara on Thu, 02/26/2009 - 23:04
On another note, I'm taking another course where we discuss information seeking behaviour of users (consumers). It strikes me that if tags get well used (e.g. in LibraryThing) there is the potential for librarians to use those tags as a way to understand how consumers view their inforamtion, learn from those metatags, and improve or adjust our services to them.
I have used LibraryThing to discover a new writer. I had read the books of one author and only liked a couple of her series'. I used the tags provided by other readers to discover new authors I might like. I could not use the library catalogue because the controlled vocabulary was much too restricting for this purpose.
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So maybe there is a way for
So maybe there is a way for us to harness some of the benefits of social bookmarking without also getting the problems. It's not so much libraries integrating social bookmarking into library services/functions but librarians seeing what kind of terminology is being used via social bookmarking and incorporating this terminology into library services/functions to make them more user-friendly.
Tara and Helen, I definitely
Tara and Helen,
I definitely think getting tips on language usage from outside the library setting and such, is a good idea. I don’t think you need to try and keep up with the Jones with everything, but it’s a good policy to try to think from different users' perspectives and that works for language use and communication too.