Public Terminal Use in an Online Catalog: Some Preliminary Results

Abstract

The authors have studied the transaction counts from two and one-half years' activity at the public use terminals of the Ohio State University Libraries' prototype online card catalog to determine what search options academic library patrons use the most often and whether this pattern varies from that reported in major catalog use studies.The preliminary findings indicate significant differences in search strategy that may result from a unique user group that prefers to search the online catalog, more useful searches in the online system, or special search patterns imposed by the computer hardware itself Both the different searches used by patrons and why they choose them should be important factors in the design of future online catalogs.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 21 citations exist upstream.