Search interfaces

Information systems can be said to have three major components: technology, information, and the user base. The last Century brought up several generational cycles of technology, particularly on the hardware side. Miniaturization improved prices and faster transactional speeds, which increased availability of inexpensive solutions for business and individuals. The growth in number and diversity of software applications resulted in an explosion of possibilities for the creation and the processing of information.

There is software to facilitate writing, to read, to store, to analyze, to modify, to publish, etc. Creations can be in text, in images, in moving images, sound, etc. Increased connectivity has empowered users who can now communicate and get information in ways only imagined before. But the transition to a totally automated environment has not been smooth across the information profession landscape.

The most obvious example is the old card catalog, which is now computer based and present in most libraries. It is usually known as the online catalog. Information that used to be available in the 3x5 cards is now available through computer terminals. The replication is so perfect that it reveals an issue: With a few exceptions, online catalogs are for the most part simplistic replicas of the old manual catalogs.

And it is this reality what speaks loud about an even bigger issue, that the design of those systems do not exploit the capabilities of the technology to go beyond what is known and use it to expand human capabilities and accomplish new tasks or find new uses of the information.

Perhaps the online catalogs and their complex options are empowering to some users but one could ask if they may not also explain the popularity of simple interfaces, such as those offered by google, yahoo and other Internet search engines. The multiple access points offered by many library interfaces are separated as individualized operation. Most, or all of them, such as advanced search capabilities, are consolidated into internal processes and functionality in the services mentioned above. Whereas there is added complexity to the internal operations, their main goal seems to be the improvement of the user experience. And the users come back to use them again and again.

The question is, why do libraries settle for interfaces that fail to fully exploit the power of computer systems?