From Dewey to Mosaic :considerations in interface design for children

Frances F. Jacobson: Librarian at University Laboratory High School, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA. She is former editor of the Focus on Technology column in the Journal of Youth Services in Libraries. She can be reached at University Laboratory High School Library, 1212 W. Springfield Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. Tel: [phone]; Fax: [phone].

Traditional information retrieval systems and their limitations

Why is it uncommon to see children standing in line at online public access catalog terminals? The lone library terminal in the children's department typically gets its occasional uses from staff members or adults, not from children. Or, if there is a computer that children constantly use, it is one which has educational software or games on it, but not library applications. The reasons for this situation are the same as the reasons school library media centers historically have focussed on acquiring automated circulation systems first, and online public access systems later, if at all. Electronic information retrieval products have not been designed with the developmental needs of children in mind. Online public access catalogs, in particular, have been one-size-fits-all products even though all library patrons must use them. Even when young people are the target audience of specialized reference tools, system developers have not necessarily acknowledged children's cognitive needs in product designs until relatively recently. And now, when the Internet has emerged as such a place of promise for the K-12 audience, access to it should not be compromised because finding tools ignore basic precepts that define the way young people search for information.

The information science literature contains extensive documentation of the kinds of failure that occur when library users, particularly novice users, attempt to retrieve information using traditionally designed retrieval tools, both automated and non-automated. Interface design typically has been tightly linked to the formal structure of bibliographic databases. Users must engage those structures directly in order to produce successful searches. While the construction of bibliographic systems provides the flexibility and manageability needed by experts (i.e. librarians), novice users often experience great difficulty in converting their natural language queries into successful search strategies. These problems are exacerbated when the users not only are novices, but also do not possess the intellectual and cognitive skills of...