TQR– Berry Picking Time (with apologies to both Ms. Bates and Great Big Sea)

Once in a while it is a good and refresh­ing thing to revisit some of the clas­sics. In this case a paper that I con­sider to be a pri­mary lens for look­ing at infor­ma­tion seek­ing behaviours.

Some­thing struck me as I was reread­ing Mar­cia Bates’ “The Design of Brows­ing and Berryp­ick­ing Tech­niques for the On-Line Search Inter­face” (Pub­lished in 1989, a time when on-line search­ing was awk­ward, expen­sive and the pre­serve of aca­d­e­mics and sci­en­tists. We can argue whether or not the sit­u­a­tion has actu­ally improved on another day.)

The berryp­ick­ing (or evolv­ing search) model that she describes is now a widely used short­hand for a set of user behav­iors. Unfor­tu­nately like many abbre­vi­ated terms, we for­get the full com­plex­ity of the ideas that the short­hand represents.

Five of the six spe­cific infor­ma­tion chas­ing strate­gies that she describes as being used by aca­d­e­mic searchers are used every­day by the blog­gers and blog read­ers. Blogs have evolved tools for their own ver­sions of:

• Foot­note Chas­ing: (also known as back­ward chain­ing.) No need to write that cita­tion down and go the library to look up the cited mate­r­ial, just click on the link in the blog post and get an imme­di­ate look at it.

• Cita­tion Chas­ing: (for­ward chain­ing,) Most non-academics don’t ever learn about using a cita­tion index but it’s one of the best ways to move your search for infor­ma­tion for­ward through time. Now with track­backs every­one can do cita­tion chas­ing with­out even know­ing that they are engag­ing in one of the rit­u­als of grad­u­ate school. Also have look at technorati’s blog reac­tions for links to blog posts that refer to another post.

• Jour­nal Run: Instead of sit­ting on the floor of the peri­od­i­cals stacks run­ning your fin­ger down the table of con­tents of each issue of the Jour­nal of Cat-like Things for the last two years just click on the handy archive links in the left (right) hand nav­i­ga­tion pane of the blog.

• Author Search­ing: Most blog writ­ers who pub­lish in more than one place add links to their other blogs or guest writ­ing spots in their “home” blogs.

• Sub­ject Searches: Searches lim­ited to the world of blogs and blog­ging are avail­able from Tech­no­rati, Google Blog Search, and a slew of spe­cial­ized blog search engines.

The sixth search tech­nique is a lit­tle harder to place in the blog world. At least I thought it was, until I spent some time look­ing at a hand­ful of blogs try­ing to find good exam­ples of the first five techniques.

• Area Scan­ning: the habit of look­ing at the adjoin­ing shelves. Once you have found Audubon’s Birds of North Amer­ica (DDC 598AUD) you will find Kale’s Florida’s Birds (DDC 598.2975 KAL) as well as Garrido’s Field Guide to the Birds of Cuba (DDC 598.097291 GAR) on nearby shelves. Handy if you’re look­ing for infor­ma­tion on birds you might see in the Florida Keys. The blog equiv­a­lent is look­ing at the blog rolls. Per­haps not as tidy as the library shelf model but none-the-less titles co-located by being placed on the same list are likely to have use­ful rela­tion­ships to one another. (This blog is the sad counter exam­ple; my blog roll is exactly a list of things that are not related to the pri­mary topic of my essays.)

For the next cou­ple of days I’ll be more aware of which search habits I might be drag­ging from the paper based past into the dig­i­tal present present and think­ing about whether or not they are still use­ful and if use­ful are they well pro­vided for?