Dissertation Information for David AbelsNAME:
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SCHOOL: ADVISORS: COMMITTEE MEMBERS: MPACT Status: Fully Complete Title: Sequencing items in multiple-item displays on online public access catalogs Abstract: Experiments on the sequencing affects of four display sequences, Author, Title, Publication Year, and Random, of multiple-item displays on Online Public Access Catalogs (OPACs) were designed and tested for three scanning tasks. The tasks were derived from a model of OPAC user scanning behavior of multiple-item displays of item descriptions retrieved by a subject search. The model defined the scanning behavior of a user as one in which a user applies criteria in addition to the actual subject searched in order to identify items pertinent to his retrieval objective. The model identified three criteria that a user can apply: authorship, currentness, and subject-relatedness. Scanning behaviors in which two criteria were applied at the same time by a user to meet a specified retrieval objective were investigated. The effectiveness of a display was measured by its scannability, the elapsed time taken to scan the display to identify relevant items. Also investigated were the effects of field order--the order of the bibliographic elements in the item descriptions--on display scannability, and whether there was an interaction between display sequence and field order. The findings showed that when authorship was one of two criteria applied by a user, the most effective displays were ones in which the items were sequenced by author and in which the left-most element in the item descriptions was the author. The other bibliographic element did not positively affect user performance either when used to sequence displays or when used in the left-most position. These findings suggested that authorship takes precedence over any other criterion when applied jointly with another criterion in scanning displays from a subject search. When currentness and subject-relatedness were the two criterion applied, the bibliographic element supplying currentness information resulted in more effective displays, both when used to sequence the items and as the left-most field in the item description. Sequencing items randomly, as is currently done in some operational OPACs, never had a positive effect on user performance. Sequences in which the bibliographic element used to sequence was unrelated to the criteria being applied produced significantly slower scannability than the most effective sequence. |
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