A Case Study of Users’ Mental Models of Traditional and Digital Libraries

A user's understanding of the libraries they work in, and hence of what they can do in those libraries, is encapsulated in their 'mental models' of those libraries. In this paper, we present a focused case study of users' mental models of traditional and digital libraries, based on observations and interviews with eight participants. It was found that a poor understanding of access restrictions led to risk-averse behaviour, whereas a poor understanding of search algorithms and relevance ranking resulted in trial-and-error behaviour. This highlights the importance of rich feedback in helping users to construct useful mental models. Although the use of concrete analogies for digital libraries was not widespread, participants used their knowledge of Internet search engines to infer how searching might work in digital libraries. Indeed, most participants did not clearly distinguish between different kinds of digital resource, viewing the electronic library catalogue, abstracting services, digital libraries and Internet search engines as variants on a theme. INTRODUCTION One promising approach to thinking about the use and usability of digital libraries is to consider how users understand the libraries they work with. Do users draw on analogies from traditional libraries or from Internet searching to make sense of their interactions with digital libraries? How do they choose what to do and predict the effects of their actions? Within Human–Computer Interaction and cognitive psychology, there is broad consensus that people form 'mental models' (Gentner and Stevens 1983, Johnson-Laird 1983) of systems that they work with, which help them understand those systems and choose courses of action for using them. In this paper, we report on a study in which we investigated people's mental models of both traditional and digital libraries, in order to compare and contrast their understanding of these two kinds of information resources.