This week’s readings focus on information retrieval systems and why some are used and some are not. The lecture given by Calvin Mooers in 1959 gives us perspective on the efficacy of different retrieval systems. The speech he gave was so influential that librarians and information specialists still refer to and use Mooers’ Law in their everyday work. It states, “An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it,” (Mooers, 1960). This poses an intriguing quandary for a librarian. How does one go about getting the end user just the right amount of information, and what is so painful and troublesome about information retrieval systems?
The following two readings jump ahead 50 years to focus on two forms of retrieval systems in use today. Google has of course been wildly successful as a search engine on the world wide web. The article explains the method Google uses to collect and rank the results when it receives a search query. I thought it interesting that Google uses many computers to work on one search query at the same time, thus saving the time it would take for one very large, very powerful computer to sift through the same amount of data. The question I kept on coming back to has to deal with Mooers Law though. How is Google so very successful when really their rankings are based on popularity, and there is no real way to discern if one’s search results are all that valuable?
The final article describes the catalog system that the library at North Carolina State University has been attempting to implement and make more user friendly. What makes the system they were developing noteworthy is that they were moving beyond the system as application model, and moving towards the system as platform model (Sierra, Ryan, and Wust 2007). Essentially, this means that instead of having a catalog that is static and unchanging, it could be reprogrammed by outside users, more adaptable to changing environments, and ultimately more versatile. If libraries are going to compete with Google and other popular search engines, and also stay competitive in the ongoing internet battle for attention, these are the kind of steps that are going to have to be made. It is encouraging to see the NCSU programmers attempting to make their systems compatible with mobile devices as well, as that is clearly the direction the end user is taking us. Google has certainly seemed to have muzzled Mooer of late, and it’s up to librarians to see if they can do the same.
Question for class: What aspects of the Google search engine helps it avoid the pitfalls expressed in Mooers’ Law?
References
1. Mooers, C.N. (1960). Mooers’ Law or, Why Some Retrieval Systems Are Used and Others Are Not.” Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 1996 vol: 23 iss: 1 (via ProQuest Database)
2. Cutts, M. (2005). “How Does Google Collect and Rank Results?” Google’s Newsletter for Librarians. Retrieved from http://www.google.com/librariancenter/articles/0512_01.html
3. Sierra, T., Ryan J., and Wust, M. (2007). Beyond OPAC 2.0: Library Catalog as Versatile Discovery Platform. Code4lib. Available at http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/10/comment-page-1
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