bangersandmash

One of the things that I’ve been working on over the past year is ways to help disciplinary novices create better search terms and search strategies. Research has shown that domain novices are particularly poor at identifying appropriate search terms — largely because they are not yet familiar with the terminology and relationships used within the discipline (Hsieh-Yee, 1993; Vakkari, 2001). As a result I’ve been very interested in different ways of analyzing strengths and weaknesses of search strategies in order to better advise and support students at the beginning of their research. Max L. Wilson and Daniel Tunkelang had an interesting little back-and-forth about ambiguity of terms and clarification vs. refinement. Hopefully they’ll continue this discussion as it is yielding many interesting ideas.

This could prove to be useful in a teaching context. Even though the article that Wilson cites shows that only 16% of search terms were ‘ambiguous,’ one has to wonder if these terms would have been ambiguous had the searcher used a discipline-specific search engine or database rather than a general search engine. Also one has to wonder if there is a difference between the percentage of ambiguous terms found in queries resulting from problems with low complexity (ie. when was “Rubber Soul” released) to queries with high complexity (ie. what was the impact of the trans-atlantic shipping on youth culture in 1950s Liverpool?). Could directing students towards discipline specific sources help with the ambiguity problem? Possibly. Discipline specific sources have the advantage of rewarding correct term selection with high-relevance material (if “relevance” is defined as “from the right disciplinary context”) however they are also very punishing — zero results, for example — for those who do not have the right search terms yet. Developing strategies for the latter group has been the biggest challenge when teaching information seeking skills.

Obviously I need to spend more time thinking about this.