穆斯定律英文原文.doc

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1、【精品文档】如有侵权，请联系网站删除，仅供学习与交流穆斯定律英文原文.精品文档.AbstractMooers Law, widely referenced in the literature of Library and Information Science, has generally been misinterpreted as concluding that customers will tend not to use Information Retrieval systems that are too difficult or frustrating, when in fact th

2、e law addresses the reluctance of customers to use any type of IR system, regardless of its faults or merits, within an environment in which having information requires more effort than not having it. An expansion of Mooers original law is proposed, based upon a “Scale of Information Retrieval Envir

3、onments,” which includes not only those types of environments addressed by Mooers, but those in which a premium is placed upon having information, as well as those in which the effort required from having information vs. not having it is fairly evenly balanced.1. IntroductionIn 1959, Calvin Mooers,

4、one of the pioneers of Information Retrieval, set forth what he called a “contradictory principle” of the fledgling science, and attached his own name to it: Mooers Law: An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have inform

5、ation than for him not to have it ( Mooers 1959b, p. 1).Since that time, his law has been widely referenced, especially in recent years as Information Retrieval has become more central to our society and our individual lives; a by-no-means exhaustive survey of the World Wide Web and the literature o

6、f various disciplines (Business, Education, Computer Science, and Library Science) reveals several dozen citations from the last decade alone. An interesting thing has happened to Mooers Law, however, along the way to acceptance: the law that is becoming widely held as true by information profession

7、als is not the same one that Mr. Mooers proposed.The difference between the actual law and its mutation centers specifically upon a misinterpretation of the word “have,” a misinterpretation which perhaps results primarily from reading the law excerpted from the original article in which it appeared,

8、 and applying it to a concern that is distinctly separate from the one Mr. Mooers was attempting to address. What follows, then, is an effort to compare and contrast what are really two very different Mooers Laws, which for the purposes of this discussion will be categorized as “In” and “Out of” con

9、text.2. The Law in ContextMr. Mooers originally proposed his law during a panel discussion at the Annual Meeting of the American Documentation Institute at Lehigh University in October 1959; the remarks he made there were “excerpted, with modifications” from his Information Retrieval Selection Study

10、, Part II: Seven System Models, written earlier that same year. The law then appeared in print as a brief paper in Zator Technical Bulletin 136 in December, and as an editorial the next year in American Documentation (1960). More recently, it has been reprinted in The Scientist, both in paper format

11、 and online (1997).Mooers Law, as he explains it, focuses on the “painful and troublesome” aspects of having information in hand and therefore feeling obligated to do something with it; in his estimation, given what he calls the “present intellectual and engineering climate” (1959b, p. 1), the custo

12、mer might just as well wish not to have the information, even if it is readily available. For, he notes, “If you have information, you first must read it, which is not always easy. You must then try to understand it. To do this, you may have to think about it” (1959b, p. 2). In Mr. Mooers own words,

13、 what he is setting forth is a “principleof behavior” (1959b, p. 1), and his concern is with changing a climate in which that behavior is more often rewarded than punished. The ability of an information retrieval system quickly and efficiently to place information in the customers hands is not the i

14、ssue; indeed, that is what Mr. Mooers is lamenting. In the building and planning of our information handling and retrieving systems, we have tended to believe implicitly, and to assume throughout, that having information easily available was always a good thing, and that all people who had access to

15、 an information system would want to use the system to get the information. It is now my suggestion that many people may not want information, and that they will avoid using a system precisely because it gives them information emphasis in original. (1959b, pp. 12)In his original Seven System Models

16、study, he goes even further, setting forth the following as a corollary to his as-yet-unnamed principle: “Where an information retrieval system tends not to be used, a more capable information retrieval system may tend to be used even less” (1959a, p. 34). This is not only different from the Mooers

17、Law that appears so frequently in the literature of today, but given a particular “intellectualclimate” such as the one he describes, distinctly at odds with it. The Law out of ContextMooers Law, as it is now popularly perceived among what might be termed the “Information Community”, focuses upon th

18、e effort that the user of a retrieval system must put forth to acquire the desired information. J. Michael Pemberton, ostensibly quoting Mooers, has restated this succinctly as follows: “The more difficult and time consuming it is for a customer to use an information system, the less likely it is th

19、at he will use that information system” (1989, p. 46). Roger K. Summit, Chairman Emeritus of DIALOG Information Services, phrases it another way: “Mooers law tells us that information will be used in direct proportion to how easy it is to obtain” (1993, p. 16).This interpretation of the law is gener

20、ally used as a cautionary tale to those who would provide access to information: If you build it, and make it too hard, they will not come. To anyone who has used a difficult search engine or database interface, this has the ring of truth to it, and that may be why Mooers Law, once removed from its

21、original context, has resonated on the Internet and within the literature of Information Science. Here, it seems, is the original articulation of many of our current frustrations. Although those frustrations may indeed be valid, they are not the same ones that led Mr. Mooers to compose his “contradi

22、ctory principle”: the Information Community of today (and yesterday as well, according to Mooers) assumes that users want information and would acquire it if it were easy enough to obtain; he reflects that, sadly, this may not always be the case (1959a, p. 1).Both concernsthat customers will not use

23、 IR systems because having the information is too much trouble and because getting the information is too much troubleare ultimately behavioral in nature, and both adhere to what Esther G. Bierbaum sets forth as a “unifying principle” for library and information science (1990, p. 18), namely Zipfs “

24、Principle of Least Effort”, which contends “that the entire behavior of an individual is at all times motivated by the urge to minimize effort” (1949, p. 3), but they are clearly separate problems, with separate solutions. We, that is, the Information Community of today, assume that there is a techn

25、ical solution to our concern: if we can build systems that are faster, more intuitive, and provide the customer with results that more nearly match what he or she requested, then those systems will be heavily used. Mooers suggests that the solution to his concern lies in changing the culture that cr

26、eated it, and acknowledges that this is “no easy task” (1959a, p. 39). Again, it is important to emphasize that this solution lies outside the realm of hardware and software; in the conclusion of his Seven System Models study, Mooers clearly states that, in a culture such as the one he describes, “t

27、he amount of use of a retrieval system depends upon the intellectual environment or social climate surrounding the system, and not upon the faults or merits of the system itself” (1959a, p. 39).4. The Context of EnvironmentMooers acknowledges that his law, if true, is a “pessimisticeven a cynical co

28、nclusion” (1959a, p. 32, 1959b, p. 1), and at first glance such a conclusion would seem to paint his entire career, and those of others in the field, as a futile endeavor, but for the fact that the law is restricted to certain “user environments” (1959a, p. 2). This turns out to be an important poin

29、t. The specific environment that Mooers was addressing was one that he believed existed within “many companies, laboratories, and agencies” of his day, an environment in which “rewards, instead of punishment, go with not using information” (1959b, pp. 12). He acknowledges, however, that “there are s

30、ituations where the diligent finding and use of information is stressed and rewarded, and where failure to find or to use information is severely punished” and notes that “in such places, we can expect retrieval systems will be actively used” (1959b, p. 2). In his Seven System Models study, he cites

31、 “the best of the chemical or pharmaceutical laboratories” as examples of this type of environment, ones in which “managementis well aware of the dollar costs and legal hazards of not making use of information” (1959a, p. 33). Earlier in the same study, he points out that, in an environment such as

32、this, “where the need for information is high enough” even “fundamentally poor systems may be well used” (p. 5).Based on these observations, then, what might be termed a Scale of Information Retrieval Environments suggests itself. On one end of the scale there are environments in which it is far mor

33、e painful to have information than to not have it; on the other end, the exact opposite is true. What is interesting about these extremes of the scale is that in either case, at least theoretically, the performance of the IR system will not affect the amount of its use since in the one no improvemen

34、ts in design or efficiency will entice the user to acquire information that will cause him such inconvenience, whereas in the other, no amount of frustration inherent in using the system will deter him from discovering information that he knows is absolutely vital to (for example) his continued empl

35、oyment. Surely, though, most environments that include information retrieval are not at either end of the scale but rather somewhere in between, and it seems logical to suggest that, within this “in between”, system performance does matter. Indeed, it might be argued that, as one approaches the midp

36、oint of the scale, performance becomes the critical factor in whether or not the system is used.If one accepts this “Scale of Information Retrieval Environments”, then perhaps it can finally be seen how the Mooers Law that is “in context” can coexist with that which is not: the first would hold true

37、 in environments at one extreme of the scale, whereas the second would hold true at or near the midpoint. It follows, as well, that if we were to combine these two laws with yet a third, one addressing the other extreme of the scale, then it might be possible to articulate a set of principles that w

38、ould govern the use of systems in any such type of IR environment.5. Mooers Law ExpandedIt seems unlikely that Mooers, despite the attention he focuses upon environments in which IR systems tend not to be used, was unaware of the rest of the scale; his observations about “the best of the chemical or

39、 pharmaceutical laboratories” acknowledge the opposite extreme, whereas the very study in which his law is first mentioned seems to exist primarily to address the needs of those environments that are in between. Indeed, early on in this Seven Model Systems study, he makes a statement that very close

40、ly resembles what his law has now become: “If the burden on the users of the information becomes too high, either in the retrieval process or in the labor of delineating new material, the users will give the system up and try to get along without it” (1959a, p. 6). Clearly, though, this statement ha

41、s no meaning within either of the environments that lie at the extreme ends of the scale; it makes sense only if applied to the middle. Thus, it would seem that an expansion of Mooers original law would be in order:Mooers 1st Law: In an environment in which it is more painful and troublesome for a c

42、ustomer to have information in hand than for him not to have it, an IR system will tend not to be used.Mooers 2nd Law: In an environment in which it is absolutely critical for a customer to have information, an IR system, no matter how poorly designed, will tend to be used.Mooers 3rd Law: In an envi

43、ronment in which the trouble of having information vs. that of not having it are fairly evenly balanced, system design and performance tend to be the deciding factors in whether or not an IR system will be used.REFERENCES Bierbaum, E.G. (1990). A paradigm for the 90s: In research and practice, libra

44、ry and information science needs a unifying principle; “least effort” is one scholars suggestion. American Libraries, 21(1). Mooers, C.N. (1959). Information retrieval selection study. Part II: Seven system models. Cambridge, MA: Zator Company.o Web of Science Mooers, C.N. (1959). Mooers Law; or why

45、 some retrieval systems are used and others are not. Zator Technical Bulletin, 136, Cambridge, MA: Zator Company; and editorial of same title, American Documentation, 11(3): i, July 1960; reprinted in The Scientist, 11(2): 10, Mar 17, 1997. Pemberton, J.M. (1989). Telecommunication: Technology and devices. Records Management Quarterly, 23(1). Summit, R.K. (1993). The year 2000: Dreams and nightmares. Searcher, 1(1). Zipf, G.K. (1949). Human behavior and the principle of least effort. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.