Variety

I was in a grocery store the other day and was struck by the variety of Coca-Cola available.  These are all identifiable as 'Coke', not other products that the Coca-Cola company makes.  I can remember when Coke came in one flavor and, if I remember correctly, only one or two sizes.  (Potato chips only came in one flavor too, as strange as that now sounds.) Now, if you count diet Coke, and caffeine-free Coke, and caffeine-free Diet Coke in refrigerator 12-packs, and Vanilla Coke in cute little 8-ounce cans, this store had more than two dozen varieties of Coke!  And this was a small store in Ohio; I'm sure Coke is sold in literally hundreds, if not thousands, of different ways around the world.

What I'm getting at, is that one-size-fits-all isn't what people expect, and that we need variety in our interfaces.  Libraries have known about variety all along.  While I would maintain that resource needs across different academic campuses is very similar, the physical collections of libraries have quite a bit of divergence.  This is because the libraries accommodate the people that make the highest demands and the most use of the library, and those people are always different at different campuses.  The people our interfaces reach have differences too, and we need to accommodate them.

There are some subtleties and complex relationships in our data.  We should make these as understandable and usable as possible.  But just because some people have a hard time differentiating between Shakespeare as an author and Shakespeare as a subject doesn't mean that at least some of our interfaces shouldn't expose the difference to users that are interested, and maybe even to those that didn't know they were interested, but don't have trouble with the concept.  This doesn't mean that having every library's interface be different is a virtue, or that we need to impress people with how clever we are, or that I find the beverage industry a particularly good role model, but there is a place for variety and useful complexity.

Prompted by a comment by Paul Miller

--Th

Comments

[Paul Miller]

Thom

Interesting to see me 'prompting' a discussion on Coke. So do Coca Cola Corp have to pay me now? :-)

I agree that we need variety in our search interfaces, but we need to manage the line between offering choice and creating confusion.

I stand by my earlier point about the need to treat (almost) every user as (almost) a new user. University libraries, although used, are probably only regularly used by a quite small subset of their members. In public libraries, it's even worse.

We grow up with Coke and its varieties. We learn how to choose from the vanilla and the lemon and the caffeine free (we learn that that one is pointless, right?). Even when confronted by a new variety, we have cues and language skills sufficient to work it out. "Vanilla" means something to us in the context of a flavour on the side of a cola bottle.

Most of us don't grow up with library systems, although hopefully many/most of us do still grow up with regular visits to browse the children's book selection. We aren't trained or conditioned to think like a library system. Our cues and signals and expectations don't work.

Just today, I (a reasonably educated, reasonably literate, reasonably library-savvy person) fought a library system I had not used before.

"Title" it said. Not "book title", "monograph title", or equivalent. So I typed in the title of the journal I wanted. Nothing. It took some searching (which I only bothered with because I couldn't believe that this library didn't have the journal in question) to find that "Periodical title" was squirelled away somewhere else.

That was a piece of 'variety' that only confused.

I am not arguing for the abolition of monograph versus periodical title fields and searches. But shouldn't the vanilla (in a different sense to that meant by Coke!) title search have searched both, with options elsewhere for format-specific titles? At the very least, the apparently vanilla title search should have been explicit about the fact that it was actually monograph-flavoured!

Here's hoping that this meaning of vanilla translates equally on both sides of the Atlantic, or this particular comment is going to make very little sense!

[Thom]

I agree.

--Th