Review

This paper reviews the user interface design history of the MARIAN library system at Virginia Tech. They interviewed users, collected detailed session logs, and collected overall statistics. The results stressed the importance of simplicity and directness in the interface, so that it is obvious to users what needs to be done to submit a search. Also, screen space, although in short supply, was used on instructional paragraphs. All this makes sense and is very practical information. I differ with the authors on whether the roughly one-third of the sessions that involve more than one query really represent proof that "query refinement is an important human activity", and I also note their finding that most queries were one field covering one term. I suspect that fast response and document clustering would be of more use that the complexities of query sets and fielded searching. The authors plan to proceed to including adaptive (personalized) behavior in MARIAN; I think the results of that research will also be interesting.
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