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Time-Life, World Reporter and the secretary: experiments with end-users

Information seeking in an information society research project

School of Librarianship and Information Studies, Polytechnic of North London, London N5 2AD, United Kingdom

Kevin Harris

School of Librarianship and Information Studies, Polytechnic of North London, London N5 2AD, United Kingdom

Gertrud Erbach

School of Librarianship and Information Studies, Polytechnic of North London, London N5 2AD, United Kingdom

After six months of training Time-Life book researchers to use online databases it is clear that they will not become end-users overnight—despite plentiful training, good facilities, user-friendly interfaces and the like. The reasons for this are less clear but high on the list come: a lack of time (to learn and maintain the necessary searching skills); a general reluctance to abandon the tried and tested—and often pleasurable—con ventional information retrieval methods (there is certainly nothing to suggest that the computer is going to replace the telephone as an information source); and the low priority given to the (formal) information-seeking component of the job (high priority being given to the more visible and pressing elements, like writing and commissioning pictures).

There is little in Time-Life's online experience to lend support to the belief that there will be wide-scale end-user searching in the near future. Online will find its place in the array of information retrieval methods at the disposal of the user and will undoubtedly be used where manual methods have failed: it is unlikely, however, to supplant manual systems that work well and are well-liked.

Secretaries do appear to be well-qualified, and in an excel lent position to become a major end-user group and might indeed pose a threat to the librarian intermediary in the near future.

Journal of Information Science, Vol. 12, No. 4, 167-175 (1986)
DOI: 10.1177/016555158601200403


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