So I started reading "Information seeking through students' eyes: The MIT photo diary study".

The MIT librarians asked 32 students to keep track of how they sought "information related to their academic life" for 7 days. The study used screen shots, notes, and interviews to gather this information.

I am getting more and more excited to do a little information diet study on myself. I would not want to separate my "academic life" information behavior from my "social life" though. I mean, according to this study I am a millenial (born between 1976-1996), and although I loathe the name, I live a woven life.

For example right now I am working at my library's ready reference desk, reading this paper, and writing this blog post!

Search Radar has an interesting approach that would reflect the ASK view of information seeking. Instead of returning links to other web pages, Search Radar gives back a list of related terms. These are display in a link cloud and in a list. From this list, you can then search a major search engine. Yes, it's an intermediate step, but for unknown or vague information, it might be a step that adds clarity to the seeker's strategy.

Directory of Open Access Repositories - OpenDOAR
OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. Each OpenDOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information that is recorded here. This in-depth approach does not rely on automated analysis and gives a quality-controlled list of repositories.
United States    Canada    Search or Browse for Repositories     FAQ   
Example: Health and Medicine/English/Multimedia

Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)
We are promoting open access to the research literature pre- and post-peer-review through author self-archiving in institutional eprint archives. Open access to research maximises research access and thereby also research impact, making research more productive and effective.
Search     Google Custom Search    Help (WIKI)

In E-Health Reality Check, she notes that the recent "Information Searches that Solve Problems" study showed that about 80% of respondents who had recently needed health information turned to a health professional, half turned to friends and family and 46% turned to the Internet.

The earlier "E-patients with a chronic disease or disability" report on the National Cancer Institute's HINTS study stated that, while nearly half of those queried said they would turn first to a health professional, 46% who had recently looked for cancer information had looked online, compared with 11% who had actually consulted a health professional.

She suggests that all of these things may be true - that if a respondent had a serious health problem they would consult a physician, but if they were just exploring a possible health problem they might look online. She writes,

I don't think many people dispute the e-patient trend, but it is important to remember that the internet is more often a supplement to other sources, not a replacement.

I’ve been rereading this textbook to reacquaint myself with the theory behind information classification and retrieval.  I’m really enjoying the discussions on the intangible nature of information, information organization and why technology cannot replace the service that information professionals provide.  I am also enjoying the emphasis on the importance of bibliographic databases, such as library catalogues, over the use of the internet.

The first chapter of this text, “The Search for Information in the Online Age” focuses on information retrieval in a society that is facing information overload.  Originally, cataloguers were charged with the tasks of collecting and preserving information. With high literacy rates and the spread of digital information, our focus has shifted to figuring out ways to retain and find information.  With the abundance of print and digital materials available, it is no longer expected that libraries will maintain all of the physical items in one place. We are expected to organize the information so that it can be retrieved, wherever it is or isn’t physically located (ie. digital information, downloadable programs and documents).

While it is true that technology has assisted us greatly in the storage and retrieval of information, it cannot replace what we do.  Despite the belief that the internet or copy cataloguing is a cheap and easy solution, there is a human side of information seeking that cannot be forgotten.  From my understanding of this text, in-house information specialists (cataloguers) add an intellectual and human element to information retrieval.  The first and most obvious need for “real” cataloguers involves reviewing information.  Are there spelling errors, words that have been misused, incorrect data, or inappropriate subject headings?  Is the material outdated?

As a cataloguer in Canada, I can give you several examples in our catalogue where the human element is also important.  We take almost all of our subject headings and authorities from LC.  However, we do not use the heading “African American” in our library system.  We use the subject heading “Blacks”.  As a result, when we copy catalogue, all of the records with African American have to be edited to use our local term.  Our headings for Indigenous/Aboriginal Peoples differ from LC as well.  Cataloguers in each library create local headings to help “customize” our catalogues and records to assist in fulfilling their specific community’s needs.  Cataloguing, and as an extension bib records, are not a one-size fits most” model.

While many people will flippantly say that most information can just be searched on the internet, my response is to point out that information on the internet is not evaluated, filtered or organized.  Many times, if you perform the same exact search twice, the results retrieved will differ.  The internet retrieves large amounts of information that must be evaluated before it is selected.  Our catalogues already do that for patrons.  Catalogues also provide controlled vocabulary and reliable resources.

The first chapter of this text goes on to explore the usefulness of different types of searching for information seekers.  They do not fit a “model” and they all have different needs.  We do not know what an information seeker will find relevant and what is relevant to one seeker may not be relevant to another.  Also, information seekers use information and seek information for different reasons.  I find this aspect of searching fascinating, especially when I’m cataloguing or thinking of future policies and procedures.  How we catalogue helps define people’s searches and the information they will retrieve.  Their training in our catalogue will shape their searches and our “labeling” of materials when using subject headings may impact whether or not an information seeker chooses a resource.

Reading again how information retrieval works from an information seeker’s perspective continues to be a form of professional development for me.  Bogged down by the politics and tasks of daily library life, it’s easy to forget the theories and ideals behind what we do.  For instance, it is nice to be reminded that our catalogue is not, even in its most basic form, a one-sided tool.   Information seeking and information retrieval is an interactive process that we play a vital role in.  How we structure our catalogues, format our bib summaries and catalogue items impact information seekers.  And, our information seekers impact how we catalogue and the appearance of our catalogue.  We are a group of interlinking entities that react, shift and move forward together.

In brief, the report finds that survey respondents who had experienced one of 10 types of problems that had a potential connection to the government or government-provided information (including a serious illness or health concern) turn for information to the Internet (58%); professionals such as doctors, lawyers, or financial experts (53%) ; friends and family members (45%), newspapers & magazines (36%), directly contacting a government office or agency (34%), TV and radio (16%), or public libraries (13%). Interestingly, those turning to public libraries were often "GenY" young adults.

The study also found that those with health issues turned most often to experts, then friends & family, then the Internet.

Find the Pew Internet summary and links to the full report at: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/231/report_display.asp

...The survey results challenge the assumption that libraries are losing relevance in the internet age. Libraries drew visits by more than half of Americans (53%) in the past year for all kinds of purposes, not just the problems mentioned in this survey. And it was the young adults in tech-loving Generation Y (age 18-30) who led the pack. Compared to their elders, Gen Y members were the most likely to use libraries for problem-solving information and in general patronage for any purpose...The focus of the survey was how Americans address common problems that might be linked to government. The problems covered in the survey: 1) dealing with a serious illness or health concern; 2) making a decision about school enrollment, financing school, or upgrading work skills; 3) dealing with a tax matter; 4) changing a job or starting a business; 5) getting information about Medicare, Medicaid, or food stamps; 6) getting information about Social Security or military benefits; 7) getting information about voter registration or a government policy; 8) seeking helping on a local government matter such as a traffic problem or schools; 9) becoming involved in a legal matter; and 10) becoming a citizen or helping another person with an immigration matter...Click here for a PDF of the entire report.

This articlegives an overview of creativity support and what that means in terms of research and in building software tools. Of course, this is something that is very important to me, but I think we still have a ways to go. And there are a lot of different types of creativity -- artistic creativity, scientific creativity, just plain radical thinking about existing problems. It seems like there are a lot of points at which support is needed -- which of those points are under the information science umbrella?

Well obviously in the search/exploration phase. Shneiderman mentions annotation and faceted search specifically. I am particularly frustrated by how difficult (read impossible) it is to have a single annotation system that can handle multiple file formats. So I can annotate straight HTML pages using one of a number of different Firefox plugins -- but what happens when I get to a PDF? It doesn't help me to have a different annotation system for each different file format. They all need to be accessible from the same interface.

Then if you had robust annotations, they could be used in concert with the annotated content to structure richer "more like this" searches. So that you could build up a collection over time of background material.

So this would support more structured creativity of the scientific discovery variety, as would different kinds of information visualizations. I am less clear on where IS fits into the world of artistic creativity support, I'll have to cogitate on that for a while.

This article is part of reading I'm doing to increase my understanding of various aspects of health informatics. The biggest thing I gleaned from this paper is to start thinking about how to incorporate collaborative tools in information-seeking environments. I'm already unhappy that it's so difficult to find annotation tools you can use for documents you run across on the Web -- mostly because I haven't found one that handles PDFs seamlessly. So what I want is something that integrates into Firefox that lets you highlight and add sticky notes to any kind of document, be it HTML, PDF, PNG, etc. But I haven't found that yet, and it frustrates me. So that's one piece. Another would be the ability to "annotate in chat", so that if you had a shared screen information seeking environment, people could comment on the information-seeking process and perhaps add information that was not available formally. As Reddy & Spence argue, this is extremely prevalent in the patient care environment -- a great deal of information seeking there goes on verbally and face-to-face, but how does this transfer to geographically dispersed patient care teams, which are likely to become more common in the future?

See Shultz M. Comparing test searches in PubMed and Google Scholar. J Med Libr Assoc 2007; 95(4):442-445. [Open Access]

Google Scholar is terrific for serendipitous searching, especially if you use the Cited By feature. This is what I tell my students:

• Use Google Scholar as a starting point, keeping in mind limitations such as lack of subject indexing and undeterminable coverage
• Use the Advanced Scholar Search to take advantage of several advanced search features at the same time, and use the Scholar Preferences
• Enrich your searches by using other (free) databases such as PubMed or TRIP  (Turning Research Into Practice) or the Index to Chiropractic Literature because Scholar's coverage of MEDLINE, for example, is incomplete (although Scholar does cover a lot of "grey literature" absent from PubMed)

If you compare the search features on the Google Advanced Search and Google Scholar Advanced Search pages, some puzzling differences appear. Some features may be used in both. Here are some highlights of Scholar and Google search features:

Downloading into bibliographic software

I have been frustrated by what I thought was the inability to download references from Scholar. Well, this week I discovered that you can download from Google Scholar, and into 5 different software managers. Outstanding! Simply go to Scholar Preferences , scroll down to Bibliography Manager and choose one.  See the link Import into RefMan on the bottom line in this screen shot (click on the image to enlarge it):

     Link to search (Turn on the bibliography manager in Google Scholar to see all the links.)

Boolean searchingWords and phrases in both Googles are automatically ANDed. OR can be used (uppercase). You can NOT words or phrases by using  - .Truncation or wildcard searching

Phrase searching

"Exact phrase" is an option in both advanced search screens; enter phrases in quotation marks in basic searches.

Author searching

This is a search feature in Google Scholar advanced search; au:  in basic search also works, although results may be incomplete (e.g. au: taylor-vaisey)

Publication searching

This is a search feature in Google Scholar advanced search. Caution: Titles are entered in the form in which they appear in publications, and the search screen only gives one chance to enter titles. Publication:  seems to work in some cases, but is unreliable. There is no way to capture all forms of a title in one search, as far as I can see.

Date searching

You can specify date ranges in Scholar; broad ranges only are available in Google.

Language searching

Google has a long drop box for countries on its advanced search screen. You can also choose from many languages in Google preferences. Scholar has no language feature on its search page, but you can choose 8 language limiters in Scholar Preferences. (A puzzling difference that may have to do with bias ...)

File type

This is a choice on the Google advanced search page, not on Scholar. But you can limit by file type in Scholar basic search (e.g. filetype:pdf).

Domain limiting

This is a feature on the Google advanced search page, not on Scholar. But you can limit by domain in Scholar basic search (e.g. site:edu).

Citation searching

The "Cited by" feature is only in Google Scholar (see above screen shot). Also use the Related Articles feature. I don't know how they create the latter but they seem to pick title words and authors. I tried to figure out how to find all the "cited by" records for a particular author, but this seems to be pretty random, unlike PubMed, which uses a formula.

Refining results

Google Scholar includes broad subject categories in its advanced search. In Google,  however, I just discovered that you can refine a search on a topic like "chronic fatigue syndrome" by the categories below. (These appear only after you do a search.)

Treatment; Tests/diagnosis; For patients; From medical authorities; Symptoms; Causes/risk factors; For health professionals; Alternative medicine; Patient handouts; Clinical trials; Continuing education; Practice guidelines 

The opening paragraph itself is quite compelling:

"Though often seen as a casual, incidental behaviour in the general society, browsing, in the information world, is widely recognized as an important information seeking technique. In an academic context, scholars have argued that frequent browsing is often the only way to locate information and resources that cannot be readily described by index terms. Further, some kinds of information are recognized as relevant only upon discovery. In short, there are the things you know you do not know and the things you do not know you do not know. Browsing provides an alternative strategy for locating information of the first kind and may provide one of the crucial ways for information of the second kind to be encountered."

She goes one to review different definitions and models of browsing and concludes that:

"...browsing can be seen to contain four elements, iterated indefinitely, until the overall episode ends:

1. glimpsing a field of vision;
2. selecting or sampling a physical or representational object from the field;
3. examining the object; and
4. physically or conceptually acquiring the examined object, or abandoning it."

Note that the author herself recognizes that this is visually based, and it omits browsing such things as sound files or the type of browsing a blind person might do while listening to a screen reader. So we have to understand "glimpses" as both visual and auditory--and perhaps even as tactile when considering a Braille reader.

Interestingly enough, Bates pins browsing back to a primal urge all animals have to explore their environment. This recalls Peter Pirolli's and Stuart Card's Information Foraging Theory work. Bates writes:

"The in-built motivation for this exploratory behaviour can be called curiosity. Because humans are so strongly reliant on vision, bodily motion often mirrors visual search, in that the second stage of browsing often involves physical movement toward items of interest, which movement, of course, also supports closer visual inspection."

The last paragraph of the article is disappointing, however:

"The design of interactive information systems needs to incorporate an awareness of human browsing characteristics. Specifically, browsing for information in such systems should not be limited to the opportunity to scan, but instead enable the searcher to manifest the instinctive tendency to engage in a browsing sequence: to glimpse, then to examine or not something glimpsed, then to keep or not the things examined."

Such vague recommendations for someone who isn't really in the business of desiging systems always makes me cringe. What does this really mean to any of us who actually design interactive information systems? Not much, I'm afraid.

This article is timely for me, though. I'm scheduled to give a talk at the IA Konferenz in Stuttgart in November on the integration of search and browse. I'll of course be citing berrypicking material from Bates, but there may be more stuff in this article I can use too. My talk is based directly on Chapter 11 from Designing Web Navigation, where I write:

"From a user’s perspective, navigating and searching aren’t necessarily contrasting activities. People just want to find the information they need. The two aren’t mutually exclusive and really different sides of the same coin. Integrating navigation and search, then, better supports how people really look for information."

Within Range is simple enough for me! In this game you are putting books back on the shelf in the correct Library of Congress order. It's a race against the clock as you move to more complex levels. I'll Get It is based on the game Diner Dash (have to confess I'm not familiar with it) and the main character is Max, who is a student helping other students answer reference questions. You search at a computer terminal, finding results from a variety of different sources, and the challenge is to answer the reference question with the appropriate resource.

Go check the games out here at Carnegie Mellon University's Library Arcade. Screen shots from the games are shown below:

Source: Research Quest

Here's a summary of mine, which is essentially the last slide in my presentation (available on SlideShare) that sums everything up:

• The cost of adding more information is noise. Don't forget this when people talk about "unlimited shelf space" online.
• There are different types of sources of metadata to consider: user-generated metadata (e.g., tagging), technically generated metadata (e.g., entity extraction), and owner-created metadata (e.g., controlled vocabularies).
• There are also different types of structures of organization to give meaning and context to the metadata when you represent it: user-created structures (e.g., filtering tags for special interest groups), technically created structure (e.g., Google News page), and owner-created structures (e.g., a thesaurus).
• In the Long Tail, any and all types of metadata and types of structure are needed. Forget about the silly arguments that one will replace the other. Think of it as matrix with the types of metadata on the side and the types of structures on the top.
• Further, since niche markets fit the description of a bounded domain, and since traditional taxonomies and classification are often good strategies for organizing information in bounded domains, as Clay Shirky points out, AND as we move to a culture of niche markets, as Chris Anderson predicts, traditional IA and taxonomy will become more important.
• Additionally, niche markets are defined by the categories you create. Online, a "pile of information"--as David Weinberger says in Everything is Miscellaneous--begins and ends with the IA and organization you develop.
• IA in the Long Tail will be about second order design. You may not be able to customize each page or local navigation scheme. Instead, you need to provide people with the tools they need to make sense of information.
• This means a shift for IA to look at abstract, broader patterns of human information behavior and of information structures in a domain. Card sorting is great, but we need to go well beyond this. We need to look at users much more closely, as well as the inherent patterns of information in a domain.

Not the most practical talk I've given, but many people thanked for the talk and said it got them thinking. So it seemed to have been well-received.

The Wall Street Journal tells us that a library in Arizona has abandoned the DDC in favour of book spines that carry simple, plain English labels such as "History" and "True Crime". They refer to these categories as "neighborhoods". Now, those of us who hang out a lot in libraries would know that the DDC arranges human knowledge into 10 classes, 100 divisions and 1000 sections - so it's numerical and hierarchical. But now that we have Google and Yahoo!, users are pretty used to finding stuff with their own keywords and subject headings (let's leave aside the probability that a lot of it is useless stuff and let's leave aside that they're searching the world according to Google or Yahoo!). And librarians well know that the DDC has its flaws - the 600s (technology) has no topic area for computers, which have to be classified in the 004-006 section.

But I'm of two minds about this: as someone who also spends a lot of time in bookstores wasting time trying to work out how they classify books, I wonder how a simple label like "History" really helps patrons find things. But it does raise the issue of how libraries and librarians are being asked to become more "relevant" in an age in which Google is perhaps a patron's preferred information seeking method.

Apparently, the Arizona library used to check-out 100-150 books a day; now that it's de-Deweyfied (is this a term??) around 900 items a day breeze out the library doors - so there's some argument in saying that the way this library is choosing to present subject headings to its users is more relevant than the DDC. And apparently the library spoke to its users before the decision was made to dump Dewey and 80% of patrons said they go to the library to browse rather than search for a specific item. So it's the browsing versus searching debate. So I guess even libraries are now being Googlefied (is this a term too??).

But I'd like to know how many books this library (the Perry Branch in Gilbert, Arizona) actually handles. I don't know how a large library with say 200,000 books as opposed to say 20,000 would be able to cope with classifying things according to 'neighorhoods'. But full marks to them for an innovative approach and I wonder how many other libraries will follow?

And on another note: news from Libraries Interact (blog central for Oz libraries). Mark September 10, 2007 in your diaries. Librarians around the world will 'invade' various Answer sites (eg Yahoo! Answers, Amazon's Askville, Wikipedia Reference Desk). It will be a day-long Answerfest, with librarians "marketing their services to an audience that has gone elsewhere". Great stuff!

Simulation
http://zool33.uni-graz.at/schmickl/models/bee_foraging_decision.html

This raises a couple of important information seeking issues for the information architect. Firstly, how do we enable people to find information when we can't provide them with smells or waggle our tails at them? Secondly, what can we learn from this in terms of how we enable users to find things on websites?

I believe that bee foraging behaviour behaviour helps to explain the potential of folksonomies. Look at the simulation at the link above. A tag cloud is a metaphor for bee foraging. Users find content which interests them and tag the content: they smell nectar. The tag cloud tells other users where to find content which might interest them: they respond to the tail waggling dance.

Metaphor
http://del.icio.us/tag/

• The name of primary source from which the headline and lead were borrowed
• The time elapsed since the story broke
• The number of related articles written on the topic of the story

The researchers write: "...The findings from this study demonstrate that information scent is not simply restricted to the actual text of the news lead or headline in a news aggregating service. Automatically generated cues revealing the pedigree of the hyperlinked information carry their own information scent. Furthermore, these cues appear to be psychologically significant and therefore worthy of design attention. Systems that emphasize such cues in their interfaces are likely to aid information foraging, especially under situations where the user is unlikely to be highly task-motivated and therefore prone toward heuristically based judgments of information relevance. Navigational tools that highlight these cues are likely to be more effective in directing user traffic, as evidenced by early research on newspaper design (which highlighted the attention-getting potential of placement, layout, and color) and screen design (focusing primarily on typography and color...Finally, visualization efforts should focus on attracting user attention towards-and making explicit the value of-proximal cues instead of simply concentrating on visualizing the underlying information."

This means to me that--even though the pages are automatically generated--there is still information architecture and information design that is critical to understanding and experience the information. Maybe machines won't replace designers and there is a place for professions like IA in the future after all. Hmm...

[1] Sundar, S. Shyam, Silvia Knoblock-Westerwick, Matthias R. Hastall. News Cues: Information Scent and Cognitive Heuristics. JASIST 58(3): 366-378, 2007.

Now, I fully admit that the ThinkingShift blog has yet to settle into a theme and maybe it never will. My interests are diverse, ranging from quantum mechanics to the environment to information and knowledge management. A quick scan of the topics I've covered so far since flinging myself into the blogosphere shows the range. But I thought - great, people are interested in endangered species and the surveillance society. That is, until I caught sight of the search terms that people are seeking information on and somehow stumble onto the ThinkingShift blog. I imagined people would search for stuff on KM or information management given that these disciplines are my main areas of expertise; or people might search for stuff on libraries or leadership. In my wildest dreams, I hoped people would start to find me by searching for climate change, endangered species, history or archaeology stuff. But never did I imagine the search terms I encountered when I perused the stats!

I'll try and cluster the oft bizarre search terms that led people to the ThinkingShift blog in some sort of sensible arrangement. Here's a run-down of the highlights:

• There seems to be an awful lot of people out there interested in horses. These are some of the search terms - "parts of the horse"; "horse images"; "horse bits"; "horse in a black hole" and the one term that appears everyday - "horse penis". I think I've only mentioned the word "horse" in one post and I don't recall referring to "bits" or "penis" - so I'm perplexed!

• Similarly, lots of people seem to be concerned about getting stuck in black holes. Thankfully, I did a post on what to do in a black hole only recently, so have managed to put information seeker in touch with pertinent information:)- But search terms that led to the ThinkingShift blog are curious - "black hole Siberia", "black hole in tooth", "Australia black hole" and the aforementioned horse in the black hole. Now, I sometimes wonder whether culturally Australia is stuck in a black hole, but not sure what to say about Siberia.

• Then we have the serious searchers, interested in climate change and endangered cultures. Some search terms are - "shining examples of CSR", "culture and remote tribes", "science involved with carbon emissions", "carbon emissions and flight", "Google and remote tribes", "smart corporations social responsibility", how much CO2 does a tree take up". A bit of a puzzle is "Alexander the Great climate change".

• Followed by people clearly interested in animals and endangered species - "how can we help the brolga", "amur leopard", "cheetah populations", "tiger eating gazelle", "ban on tiger parts". Since I've blogged about most of these animals, I can understand the link to the ThinkingShift blog.

• A lot of people seem to be worried about the future and some of my posts on future trends and predictions may have calmed them or worried them even more! Here are some of the search terms used: "fear of nuclear war in the future", "the world in 2050", "is nuclear war a social problem", "robots in the future", "will world survive beyond 2012".

• I was pleased to see people share my concern with the surveillance society and they found the blog by searching: "surveillance in Australian society", "CCTV privacy", "Kevin Bankston smokes" (well, Bankston is the privacy lawyer for Electronic Frontier Foundation); "Google Big Brother", "Google privacy concerns", "generational gap privacy", 'live CCTV pictures Hampshire".

• Then there are the history buffs out there searching for: "solutions to ancient Rome challenges"; "nefertiti quantum mechanics" (okay not really history and not sure what Nefertiti has to do with quantum mechanics); "ancient roman names for sustainability", "Keku life", "Mayans in Peru", "Mayans and knowledge management" (what the???).

• The blog also seems to attract people interested in space and space travel with the following popular search terms used: "Neil Armstrong", "Guss Grissom death", "Guss Grissom museum", "original seven".

• Then there are the following search terms that led people to finding the ThinkingShift blog and for which I simply have no explanation for!

* Dino the dinosaur sound bytes

* asians that are not naked

* beehive concept map

* camel meat cost and recipes

* natural medicines of civil war

* dangdut belly dancer (alarmed, I tried this search on Google and there was my blog sitting at No 10 on the retrieval list. About to shoot off an angry tirade to Google, I clicked on the result and lo and behold up came my post on Eurovision. The "dangdut" came courtesy of a comment from Matt Moore and the belly dancer was a remark I made about the Turkish entry!).

* David Jones department store vision

* how to buy a house under a trust (okay, I can help you, I'm a lawyer!)

* heaving (sad to think this term led to ThinkingShift)

* sexy historic account (of what I ask??)

* quizz funny personal questions

* "temple university" "library fines"

* Salford University rant

* asian men

* french car sex (do the French know something we don't??)

* without a donkey (what the?!)

* Sarawak plastic surgeon (okay I admit I've thought about botox, but I'm not ready for the slice and dice just yet)

* a list of symbols found on the round zod (que?)

* YUM (in capitals and appears everyday in the stats - does anyone know what on earth this means??)

I've read about someone visiting the Google headquarters and being shown a large screen or screens that showed what people were searching for around the world in real time. Looking at how people have found my blog is my own mini-Google experience, but I'm not about to do posts on "horse penis" or "asian men" - so those people, please go elsewhere!

And welcome home Atlantis.

They've recently re-done the interface. Check out the the beta launch of Silobreaker.

Not surprisingly, the interface is very link rich: you can click on just about anything at any time. There are also quite a few mouse-over features that reveal a quick view of information in layers and such. I like this overall approach and feel it's appropriate for the target group. But frankly, I prefer the original version of Silobreaker. The information design of the beta product doesn't seem to help visually scanning information on the screen, and it appears more cluttered somehow (although the amount of information is about the same).

Overall, Silobreaker lives up to its claim that it provides numerous ways to slice and dice content. For a relatively new servcie, it has many strengths and an impressive range of features and functionalities. The underlying concept moves away from searching in favour of browsing; however, the product is complex and presents potential interaction problems such as small texts and targets to click. Nonetheless, Silobreaker's unique approach is likely to appeal to many users who conduct news research and require current awareness content on a regular basis.

- With the advent of digital information available online, people pointed to how much more information there is than before. At first it was about the volume of information.

- But then others pointed out that it's not the volume, it's the access to information that changed. The information was previously available, we just couldn't get to it.

- But really, you could get it if you had enough time. So my thought is that it's not the amount of information or increased access to it, but the time it takes to find, use, understand, and experience information that has really changed.

This is an important aspect of Information Foraging Theory described by Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card: "We have argued that in an information-rich world, the real design problem to be solved is not so much how to collect more information, but rather, how to optimize the user's time." Foraging for information in the digital world is a trade-off between the perceived value of information and the time it takes to interact with and experience it.

Relevance, then, is also time dependent. Relevance guru Tefko Saracevic hints at this with the notion of Situational Relevance in a paper titled Relevance Reconsidered.

Perhaps the Time of Information needs more attention. Or is this so obvious that it doesn't even need to be mentioned?

You can already pre-order it on Amazon.

About The Book:
Since web navigation design touches most other aspects of web site development in some way, the book necessarily paints a broad picture touching on many areas, including things like user research and visual design. But as much as possible the focus throughout remains clearly on creating an effective navigation system. I always try to bring it back home to web navigation whenever the conversation touches other areas.

Thank You:
It’s quite amazing to me how many people contributed to the completion of this book. Here's a shout out to you all:
- -The primary technical reviewers: Dr. Mark Edwards and Aaron Gustafson.
- -Contributors of the sidebars: Ariane Kempken, my first real mentor in user-centered design, Misha Vaughan, Eric Reiss, Donna Maurer, Victor Lombardi, Andrea Resmini, Emanuele Quintarelli, Luca Rosati, and Mark Edwards.
- -Others who read chapters for me in advance and helped out in other ways: Peter Boersma, Liz Danzico, Jochen Fassbender, Margaret Hanley, Michael Hatscher, Andrea Hill, Theba Islam, Jeff Lash, Victor Lombardi, Ariane Kempken, Michael Kopcsak, Eric Mahleb, Kathryn McDonnell, Donna Maurer, Wolf Nöding Andrew Otwell, Tanya Raybourn, Eric Reiss, Andrea Resmini, Steffen Schilb, Gene Smith, and Joseph Veehoff.