Learning from the past...the recent past.

"The truth about the information-seeking situation lies within the individual doing the seeking" (Nicholson 2005, 507).

Ain't that the truth? I love those Dervin-inspired quotes.

I also like Nicholson's ideas that libraries can and should create a user-picture based on the information we have available. "Digital Library Archaeology" reminded me of a shorter, simpler article I read for my Information Technology Management class, called "Server Logs: Making Sense of Cyber Tracks," by Darlene Fichter. She basically said that our server logs contained mountains of information about user patterns, which links and menus are used most, how good your navigation is, and when your users leave your site. Both are saying that we can use the information from digital patterns to create an understanding of the user experience for our online services.

Rose reminds us that we can use this information, and all the Information-Seeking Behavior studies of the past several decades, to improve our search tools for users. We need to keep in mind that searches may be performed differently according to different goals, different contexts, and what we learn as we search.

Another thing to keep in mind as we develop search tools brings us back to the quote above: though all of our digital information my paint a picture of user patterns, they cannot tell us exactly how or why the information was used. We know that searching is also an affective process (Thank you Kuhlthau and others). We have to actually talk (face to face or virtually) to our users to get that kind of information.


Fichter, Darlene. (2003). Server logs: Making sense of the cyber tracks. Online 27, no. 5: 47-50. Available through Academic Search Elite, EBSCOhost (accessed November 20, 2006).