Think of the last time you went into a grocery store. You expected to find milk, butter and cheese in the Dairy section, right? Canned corn is next to canned beans, which is next to canned tomatoes. Wait, this grocery store puts canned tomatoes in an international section! You walked into the grocery store with a conceptual model of how a grocery store works. When your model was disrupted, you found yourself slowed down and frustrated. The same is true of library patrons who come to your library web site expecting to find a catalog, databases, reference service and all of the trappings of a library. Those of us who still serve older adults (30+) need to be aware of their conceptual model of a library when we design web sites. The Library Model is a very strong one in American culture. This doesn’t mean you can’t use web 2.0 concepts or technology. It means you should make it easy for people who want to just find a book in the catalog or who need to know your hours or use your reference service (online or in person). Your library is not a store, a newspaper, or a corporation. It’s a library.
That said, what about the conceptual model for a younger crowd?
The last successful launch of a new conceptual model was, arguably, Google. No other major shift in how the public finds information holds such a majority of users and accomplished that in such a short amount of time. Google has become the coneptual model for finding information. So why shouldn’t we all design like Google: a nice clean single box interface? What allows Google to be so successful is not its simple design, which deserves credit on its own, but its algorithm. That’s the behind the scenes work that a computer or two perform to bring you results. If Google didn’t bring the user good results, it wouldn’t be a new conceptual model. It would have ended up in the Internet graveyard along with Gopher, Archie, and InfoSeek.
There is no library that can afford to be Google. There’s a lot of research money behind that algorithm. If we can’t deliver the same quality of results as Google, we shouldn’t be trying to use this conceptual model. We frustrate the user and shoo them away from what we can do well. That is, of course, be a library. Until federated searching lives up to its expectations the one search box ideal remains just that.
