A Review of: Sahib, N. G., Tombros, A., & Stockman, T. (2012). A comparative analysis of the information-seeking behavior of visually impaired and sighted searchers. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(2), 377–391. doi: 10.1002/asi.21696 Objective – To determine how the behaviour of visually impaired persons significantly differs from that of sighted persons in the carrying out of complex search tasks on the internet. Design – A comparative observational user study, plus semi-structured interviews. Setting – Not specified. Subjects – 15 sighted and 15 visually impaired persons, all of them experienced and frequent Internet search engine users, of both sexes and varying in age from early twenties to mid-fifties. Methods – The subjects carried out self-selected complex search tasks on their own equipment and in their own familiar environments. The investigators observed this activity to some extent directly, but for the most part via video camera, through use of a screen-sharing facility, or with screen-capture software. They distinguished four stages of search task activity: query formulation, search results exploration, query reformulation, and search results management. The visually impaired participants, of whom 13 were totally blind and two had only marginal vision, were all working with text-to-speech screen readers and depended exclusively for all their observed activity on those applications’ auditory output. For data analysis, the investigators devised a grounded-theory-based coding scheme. They employed a search log format for deriving further quantitative data which they later controlled for statistical significance (two-tailed unpaired t-test; p < 0.05). The interviews allowed them to document, in particular, how the visually impaired subjects themselves subsequently accounted for, interpreted, and vindicated various observed aspects of their searching behaviour. Main Results – The investigators found significant differences between the sighted participants’ search behaviour and that of the visually impaired searchers. The latter displayed a clearly less “orienteering” (O'Day & Jeffries, 1993) disposition and style, more often starting out with already relatively long and comprehensive combinations of relatively precise search terms; “their queries were more expressive” (p. 386). They submitted fewer follow-up queries, and were considerably less inclined to attempt query reformulation. They were aiming to achieve a satisfactory search outcome in a single step. Nevertheless, they rarely employed advanced operators, and made far less use (in only 4 instances) of their search engine’s query-support features than did the sighted searchers (37 instances). Fewer of them (13%) ventured beyond the first page of the results returned for their query by the search engine than was the case among the sighted searchers (43%). They viewed fewer (a mean of 4.27, as opposed to 13.40) retrieved pages, and they visited fewer external links (6 visits by 4 visually impaired searchers, compared with 34 visits by 11 sighted searchers). The visually impaired participants more frequently engaged in note taking than did the sighted participants. The visually impaired searchers were in some cases, the investigators discovered, unaware of search engine facilities or searching tactics which might have improved their search outcomes. Yet even when they were aware of these, they very often chose not to employ them because doing so via their screen readers would have cost them more time and effort than they were willing to expend. In general, they were more diffident and less resourceful than the sighted searchers, and had more trust in the innate capacity and reliability of their search engine to return in an efficient manner the best available results. Conclusion – Despite certain inherent limitations of the present study (the relatively small sample sizes and the non-randomness of the purposive sighted-searcher sample, the possible presence of extraneous variables, the impossibility of entirely ruling out familiarity bias), its findings strongly support the conclusion that working with today’s search engine user interfaces through the intermediation of currently available assistive technologies necessarily imposes severe limits on the degree to which visually impaired persons can efficiently search the web for information relevant to their needs. The findings furthermore suggest that there are various measures that it would be possible to take toward alleviating the situation, in the form of further improvements to retrieval systems, to search interfaces, and to text-to-speech screen readers. Such improvements would include: • more accessible system hints to support a better, and less cognitively intensive, query formulation; • web page layouts which are more suitable to screen-reader intermediation; • a results presentation which more readily facilitates browsing and exploratory behaviour, preferably including auditory previews and overviews; • presentation formats which allow for quicker and more accurate relevance judgments; • mechanisms for (a better) monitoring of search progress. In any event, further information behaviour studies ought now to be conducted, with the specific aim of more closely informing the development of user interfaces which will offer the kind of support that visually impaired Internet searchers are most in need of. Success in this undertaking will ultimately contribute to the further empowerment of visually disabled persons and thereby facilitate efforts to combat social exclusion.
Objective -This study sought to determine the characteristics of research materials used by history students in preparing their master's theses. Of which information resources formats did such students make use, and in what proportions? What was the age distribution of resources used? What was the dispersal over journal titles and over subject classification, i.e., the degree of interdisciplinarity? To what extent did the master's students make use of nonEnglish-language materials? To what extent did their institution's library hold the resources in question?The investigator was especially interested in finding quantitative support for what he terms two "hypotheses." The first of these is that historical research depends to a high degree on monographs, journal articles being far less important to it than they are to research in, especially, the natural sciences and technology. The second is that the age distribution of resources important to historical research is much flatter and longer than that of resources upon which researchers in the natural sciences and technology rely.Design -Citation analysis, supplemented with comprehensive catalogue searches.
Abstract Objective – The investigators hoped to gain an understanding of the extent to which local public libraries are used by their visitors as meeting places, and in what ways. Furthermore, they sought to determine whether certain demographic variables correlate with variations in these ways of using the library. Finally, they were looking for evidence of a relationship between the degree of the subjects’ general community involvement on the one hand, and their participation in various types of meetings in the library on the other. Design – Questionnaire-based telephone survey. Setting – Oslo, Norway. Subjects – 750 adult residents (eighteen years or older) from 3 of Oslo’s 15 boroughs. Methods – The researchers selected these boroughs (not identified in this article and referred to, unusually, as “townships”) because they judged them to represent three demographically varying types of urban community. In March of 2006, a professional survey organization drew numbers at random from a database of telephone numbers in each borough, continuing until it had reached the desired number of 250 actual survey respondents, including cell phone users, for each borough. It weighted the sample according to gender and age, and administered the telephone interviews on the basis of a questionnaire which the researchers had designed to yield quantitative data for ten independent, and seven dependent, variables. Interviewers asked the respondents to answer questions on the basis of their entire recollected personal history of public library use, rather than during a specific defined period. Six of the independent variables were demographic: borough of residence, occupational category, age category, educational level, cultural/linguistic background (dichotomous: either non-Norwegian or Norwegian), and household income category. The other four were: level of participation in local activities, degree of involvement in community improvement activities, degree to which a subject trusted various community institutions, and frequency of local library use. “Meeting intensity,” or the number of different meeting types for which a given subject could remember ever having used the library, was one dependent variable. The others were participation/non-participation in each of the six defined meeting types. The researchers employed hierarchical multiple regression analyses for determining degrees of correlation. Main Results – “Meeting intensity” correlated significantly and positively not only with frequency of library use in general, but also with the number of local activities participated in and level of involvement in community improvement activities, as well as with non-Norwegian cultural/linguistic background. It correlated significantly and negatively with household income. The investigators report no significant relationship of meeting intensity with occupational or age category, or with level of education. Participation in certain of the defined meeting types did correlate significantly with certain independent variables. Respondents tend to turn to the local public library more for “public sphere” meetings as they grow older. Participation in this kind of meeting is likewise more common among those with a higher level of community involvement and engagement, but also among the lower-income respondents. High-intensive “joint activities” meetings with friends, acquaintances, colleagues or classmates are especially popular among adults in the lower age categories, as well as among respondents with a lower level of education and with a lower household income. “Virtual” meetings (via library Internet use), also defined as a high-intensive meeting type, are especially popular with the occupational categories “job seeker” and “homemaker,” as well as with the younger respondents and with those who have a lower household income. Use of the local public library for both the “virtual” and the “joint-activities” types of meetings is also considerably more common among those with a non-Norwegian cultural/linguistic background. Frequency of library use in general was not related to participation in either of these two types of meetings at the library, but it was related to library use for the more low-intensive meeting types (chance meetings and encounters, library as rendezvous point for joint activities elsewhere), as well as to what the investigators term using the library as a “metameeting place,” i.e., a place for finding “information about other arenas and activities” in the local community. Conclusion – The local public library seems to serve, for many of its patrons, an important function as venue for meetings of various kinds. In general, using it for meeting purposes appears to be something that appeals more to younger than to older adults, more to those in the lower than to those in the higher income categories, and more to those with an immigrant than to those with an indigenous background. The perhaps even less expected finding that use of the library for a relatively intensive, instrumental kind of meeting activity correlates significantly with a lower level of education would particularly suggest a need for further research. Noteworthy, as well, is the apparent fact that those who make use of the local public library as a venue for relatively intensive meeting activity, whether physical or virtual, tend to come to the library expressly for that purpose, and visit the library less often for other reasons than do other library users. The urban districts in which respondents resided were in fact not internally homogeneous enough, nor socio-economically distinct enough from one another, to yield correlations of practical evidentiary value. It was the researchers’ working assumption that their three independent variables of community engagement – i.e., level of participation in local activities, degree of involvement in community improvement activities, and degree to which one trusts community institutions – can be taken together to represent the amount of a respondent’s “social capital.” They detected, in general, a positive correlation between the extent of such “social capital” and the use of the library as a meeting place. Neither the strength nor the direction of this relationship was clear, however, from the results of this study: both will have to be explored through further research. “Does the library contribute to generating social capital,” they ask, “or is the use of the library as a meeting place a result of pre-existing social capital?” (p. 25) They were hoping at least to discover whether the library, specifically in its role as a low-intensive and “public sphere” meeting place, contributes to the generation of “bridging” social capital between citizens of differing cultural backgrounds, with differing values, viewpoints, and interests. Though their findings did not justify this conclusion, and Skøtt’s (2005) study even contradicts it, the researchers nevertheless express their confidence that, while not a genuine “third place” in the sense intended by Oldenburg (1999), “the library as a meeting place plays a substantial role in equalizing the possibilities of being an active citizen across social and economic differences” (p. 25). But however that may be, they are in any case convinced that their questionnaire and categorization scheme for meeting types have now shown their value, and that the grouping of types into “low-intensive” versus “high-intensive” appears to be fruitful. They do concede that their approach still requires more thorough and detailed examination, and that their survey instrument must be further refined and developed.
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