Standard bibliographic information contains essential identifying
information for virtually all books and is generally sufficient for identifying
"knovvn-items." (Known items are those books that users search for specifically,
most often by author or title.) This study, however, is not concerned with end users
who are certain of what they are looking for in an OPAC. Instead, the focus
is on end-users who use an OPAC to locate and identify books on subjects
because they are uncertain which books are available to meet their information
needs. Studying these end-users is more conducive to this study because it is
reasonable to suppose that OPAC displays augmented by bibliographic
enhancements may in turn enhance the decision-making of such a population of
end-users. Several previous studies (Lipetz, 1972; Tagliacozzo and Kochen, 1970;
Muira. 1980; Hancock-Beaulieu, 1990) suggest that many end-users prefer to
browse the shelves and examine the content o f books, specifically the tables of
contents, when making decisions about the books' usefulness. Other studies
further suggest that many end-users often describe books by using the words or phrases found in tables of
contents and indexes, suggesting that these words and phrases may provide a better
indication of a book's potential usefulness than does the standard bibliographic
information. Together, these findings make a reasonable case to examine further
whether OPAC end-users might benefit from having additional bibliographic
information in an OPAC display.