Two bits saying a lot about archiving, search and retrieval.
1. Thanks to David Gammel for pointing out to the summary by Piers Young which I missed while travelling:
Bad news I think…
1. If two groups of people construct thesauri in a particular subject area, the overlap of index terms will only be 60%.
2. Two indexers using the same thesaurus on the same document use common index terms in only 30% of cases.
3. The output from two experienced database searchers has only 40% overlap.
4. Experts’ judgements of relevance concur in only 60% of cases.
This is from: JAA Sillince, 1992, Literature searching with unclear objectives: a new approach using argumentation. On-line Review, 16 (6), 391-409.
2. John Moore:
Neat little factoid from the ever-excellent newsletter of ecustomerserviceworld.
“Customers were ten times more likely to buy jams when only six varieties were on display as when there were twenty-four.”
- Psychologist Barry Schwartz, illustrating his new research that shows too much choice is making people miserable, and that some feel so paralysed they go home empty-handed. Nothing to do with ghosts and machines, but important.
Going to dig out both sources :)
Tags: knowledge mapping, usabilityArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/03/09.html#a1122; comments are here.
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