Reflection on the Principle of Least Effort

The back end, developer side of databases and search engines are something not many people know about. Many people do not realize all of the elements that go into organizing information into databases and search engines. Users are used to typing in what they are looking for and getting instant results without a second thought to all of the algorithms and processes that librarians and researchers use to make information searchable and easy to find. Bates (1999) calls this the paradigm of information science that is under the water line. This is part of being a librarian that people do not see, the forming and organizing of information.

On the user end, the principle of least effort states that when users are using databases to find sources, they are most likely to use what is easily available even if they are of a lower quality, rather than doing more work to get high quality sources (Mann, 1993). A study by Victor Rosenberg has shown that this is the case in both scholarly as well as non-scholarly users (as cited in Mann, 1993). Database users start by setting a reasonable goal: to find information that supports what they are researching. Once this goal is achieved, they stop searching, regardless of if there is better information they may be missing out on (Mann, 1993).

Librarians use bibliographic objectives to help people find what they are looking for. There are five types of bibliographic objectives that are used when looking for an entity in the library. They are finding, collocating, choice, acquisition, and navigation objectives (Svenonius, 2000). First you have to identify what you are trying to look for, for example, I want to look for a book about the history of unicorns. Next would come the collocating objective. This is not something that users have to deal with directly, this is more of how the database is set up. The collocating objective hopes that the database will pull up all of the relevant sources that I am looking for and only the relevant items that I am looking for. Keeping with my unicorn example, I search “unicorns” in a database and I get my results. The database finds 42 books in the library about unicorns, so the next step is the choice objective, which focuses on the preferences of the patron such as format and content. I then have to narrow my search and find out which entities are non-fiction and include the history of unicorns in a physical book format. This brings my search results to only three books in the library. The acquisition objective follows this and involves locating and obtaining the items you have found in the database. This can mean going to the shelves, downloading an e-book, ordering the item from another library, etc… Since I am only looking for physical books in the library I am currently in, I am able to walk over to the shelf and find the three non-fiction books about unicorns. The great part about being a librarian is that you have the talent of finding useful information to help others learn about so many subjects, but you don’t have to know anything about that subject to do it (Bates, 1999). Librarians don’t need to know anything about unicorns to help patrons learn about unicorns.

The connection between the principle of least effort and bibliographic objectives is that when creating databases and organizing information, librarians have to keep in mind that people are not going to go to great lengths to find exactly what they need and the best source for it, they are going to find what pops up first in their search and call it a day. Libraries and information organizers have to adapt to how people search for information. This means that information needs to be organized in a way that allows the best possible sources to be easy to find. This can include tagging items and articles with appropriate keywords and making sure that items are properly cataloged so they are able to be found. If I search unicorns and a book about dragons is in the first few results, there is an error in how the item was cataloged and the database needs to be updated because the collocation objective was not met. Dragons may be related to unicorns in that they are both part of mythology, but that is not what I am looking for at the moment.

References

Bates, M. J. (1999). The invisible substrate of information science. Journal of the American

Society for Information Science J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci., 50(12), 1043-1050. doi:10.1002/(sici)1097-4571(1999)50:123.0.co;2-x

Mann, T. (1993). The Principle of Least Effort. In Library Research Models: A Guide to

Classification, Cataloging, and Computers (pp. 91-101). New York City, IL: Oxford University Press.

Svenonius, E. (2000). Bibliographic Objectives. In The Intellectual Foundations of Information

Organization (pp. 15-30). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.