Resource Description and Access (RDA) includes new lists of content and carrier types intended to replace the General Material Designations (GMDs) and Specific Material Designations (SMDs) of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR), and which represent taxonomies designed to facilitate searching on content and carrier attributes of resources. However, these taxonomies were not constructed through analysis of end-user categorizations, nor have they been tested on end-users. This study investigates how end-users categorize library resources by employing the free-listing technique, commonly used by cognitive scientists and information architects.The results indicate that end-user categorizations of library resources may emphasize other facets, such as purpose, audience, and extent, in addition to content and carrier, and also levels of the content and carrier facets other than those represented by the RDA terms.
Research indicates that considerable amounts of search goal revision can take place during user-system interaction. Following a review of the treatment of this phenomenon in various models of information retrieval, an alternative model is proposed which attempts to explain search goal redefinition more fully, by distinguishing between goal change due to new information gained and goal change due to old knowledge remembered. In the case of the latter, it is postulated that external stimuli, contained for example in system feedback, raise the user’s nonconscious knowledge to consciousness, providing the user with a better understanding of their information want and goal. The new model is described as an instance of a more general model of information acquisition, embracing a spectrum of information behaviour, from purposeful query-based searching to incidental encountering.
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