IMPROVING PERSONAL-NAME SEARCHING IN ONLINE CATALOGS

A sizable proportion of the queries users submit to online catalogs be ar personal names. In fact, names figure into the most frequently used search types--author searches and subject searches. Despite findings of online catalog use studies that demonstrate the difficulties users experience entering queries bearing names, the basic system approach t o soliciting user queries for personal names and searching for them re mains the same as the approaches enlisted by the earliest online catal ogs. The purpose of this paper is to examine the performance of user q ueries that involve personal names and recommend improvements to the b asic system approach to soliciting user queries and searching for them . It uses data and analyses from two related research projects to incr ease understanding of user queries for personal names and to improve t he effectiveness of how systems solicit and search for users' queries involving personal names. Improvements include the implementation of a new design for online catalog searching that features search trees to select searching approaches that are likely to yield useful retrieval s for the topics, titles, and authors users seek; new methods for soli citing user queries bearing personal names; and enlisting the particip ation of online catalog users in the evaluation of system prompts, ins tructions, and messages that request input from them.