Exploiting knowledge-in-the-head and knowledge-in-the-social-web: effects of domain expertise on exploratory search in individual and social search environments Authors: Ruogu Kang, Wai-Tat Fu, Thomas George Kannampallil Keywords: domain expertise, exploratory search, search behavior
Abstract:
Our study compared how experts and novices performed exploratory search using a traditional search engine and a social tagging system. As expected, results showed that social tagging systems could facilitate exploratory search for both experts and novices. We, however, also found that experts were better at interpreting the social tags and generating search keywords, which made them better at finding information in both interfaces. Specifically, experts found more general information than novices by better interpretation of social tags in the tagging system; and experts also found more domain-specific information by generating more of their own keywords. We found a dynamic interaction between knowledge-in-the-head and knowledge-in-the-social-web that although information seekers are more and more reliant on information from the social Web, domain expertise is still important in guiding them to find and evaluate the information. Implications on the design of social search systems that facilitate exploratory search are also discussed.
Every librarian should have the first page of this article posted to their office door, every library school on the local bulletin board.
Think about it. Expert searchers (read librarians) find better information than novices and can serve as guides to better information.
More research is needed on how to bridge that gap in search interfaces.
In libraries I think it is now called a “reference interview.”
(Please email, tweet, etc. this post to your librarian friends.)