Online Catalogs: Making Them Better Reference Tools.

This article refers to a doctoral dissertation research done by Marilyn Lester concerning the usefulness of online library catalog systems, which showed that 40.1 percent of user searches elicited the information they wanted. Lester studied transaction logs from the computerized catalog at Northwestern University Library in Evanston, Illinois. Her sample was 1,518 subject searches from more than 200,000 subject searches. As part of her study, Lester did an extensive review of previous research. She refers to another study that analyzed the actual terms users typed into the terminal. This study by Karen Markey was a transaction log analysis of one day of user subject searches in the Syracuse University Library in New York on April 26, 1982. In this study, Markey found that of the 859 searches by 188 users, only 154 exactly matched Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and five percent exactly matched LCSH cross references. In Lester's study, user's terms matched LCSH 40.1 percent of the time. For the 59.9 percent of the users' terms that did not exactly match LCSH, she applied three search or match processes to see how they would have increased the matches with those subject headings.