Tips for Avoiding, or Celebrating, Zero Search Results

摘要

Searchers like to find things. Librarians and information professionals may be unique in that they enjoy the searching process, not just the finding bit. As Roy Tennant wrote in Library Journal in 2001, paraphrasing Herb White, "Only librarians like to search; everyone else likes to find". But most librarians and information professionals do like to find the perfect citation, book, statistic, or other piece of information for their clients and themselves. But what happens when we don't find anything, when we get zero results, a null set? Sometimes we can be so focused on finding one or more perfect answers, it can be easy to forget that, for some searches, an empty result set is exactly what the user wants, or that "no results" can lead to a more refined question. There are several strategic approaches to the null set, including checking the search statement, evaluating the database scope, and accepting zero results as success.