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Figure 2.1
Portion of an online catalog listing.
Still carrying her initial three selections, Leslie goes back to the E shelves and an hour later has examined 15 other books, selecting just two highly relevant ones to check out from the library and behind all three of the first books she chose. She knows that the bibliography in the Z shelves would help her determine whether she has missed anything – this library does not own everything – but the bibliography is two floors above her she is tired. “This is enough to finish my paper,” Leslie says to herself as she heads to the circulation desk.
In this scenario several lessons about information seeking can be observed. Although perhaps two-thirds of adults in the United States and Canada make some use of library in a given tear, relatively few (mostly students in universities) search library collections in any degree of depth. Leslie is an untypical user in that she knows how to sue a librarian and a catalog; the reluctance of even reluctance of even regular users of libraries to these resources is well documented (consider, for example, commentaries by Borgman, 1996; Hancock-Beaulieu, 1990; and Saracevic, Shaw, and Kantor, 1977).
Leslie in, however typical in her nonlinear search pattern ; her search is not a neat one that moves swiftly from catalog to shelf to circulation desk; rather, there is a back-and-forth movement between the catalog and the shelf, with considerable time taken to examine work and reconsider her query. Typical of library users, Leslie takes some of her early decisions (leaving be high the initial choices of book), and ultimately ends the search prematurely by not fetching the bibliography and checking that (presumably comprehensive) guide against her search results.