User Preferences When Searching Individual and Integrated Full-text Databases

摘要

This paper addresses a crucial issue in the digital library environment: how to support effective interaction of users with heterogeneous and distributed information resources. We compared users' preference for systems which implement interaction with multiple databases through a common interface and with multiple databases as if they were one (integrated interaction) in an experiment in the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) environment. Twenty-eight volunteers were recruited from the graduate students of School of Communication, Information, & Library Studies at Rutgers University. Significantly more subjects preferred the common interface (HERMES) to the integrated interface (HERA). For most of the subjects in this study, the greater control in HERMES outweighed the advantages of HERA such as convenience, efficiency, and ease of use. These results suggest that: (1) the general assumption of the information retrieval (IR) literature that an integrated interaction is best needs to be revisited; (2) it is important to allow for more user control in various ways in the distributed environment; and (3) for digital library purposes, it is important to characterize different databases to support user choice for integration.