Are children successful when searching for information using Online Public Access Catalogs (OPACs)? This usually depends on the OPAC they encounter. Children do not think in the same way as adults. Most OPACs were designed with adult users in mind. I have seen my students struggle to find a book or a particular subject area using the school library’s OPAC. There are times when I have been unsuccessful in helping them. How can we make OPACs more kid-friendly?
Robin (2006) came up with guidelines for designing OPACs for children. Here are a few of those ideas:
First, make it visual. Many OPACs are text-based. This can create a problem for children with limited reading skills (Robin, 2006). Using images could help to remedy this problem. Even children with higher-level reading skills benefit from visuals. As a visual learner, I too, would appreciate images for clearer understanding. This is not to say that OPACs should consist of images alone. A combination of text and images would probably work the best. Text labels are necessary for clearer understanding, for example, a book’s title and author cannot be communicated through an image alone.
Second, make it big. Many OPACs do not take the motor skills of young children into account. It is difficult for them to point and click a small target with a mouse. The problem seemed to go away when the icon size was increased. The drawback to increasing these targets is that they take up more space, therefore, fewer targets and features can be displayed concurrently (Robin, 2006). Though, I feel that it could be a positive for young children to have less information to be distracted by at one time. I would think that icon size would depend on the age of the child as well. A five-year-old will need a bigger target than a ten-year-old.
The next child-friendly OPAC idea is to enable customization. What if OPACs could be customized according to age and preference? This is important because “reactions to things like mascots, colors, screen layout, icons, and animation are personal and will differ from child to child” (Large & Beheshti, 2005, p. 336). Small children and older children may differ on their opinion of what constitutes an appealing user interface (Robin, 2006). Boys and girls may also have differing opinions. Allowing personalization will increase the OPACs appeal to a wider range of children. One drawback that I see with this is that it could become confusing to the user. Sometimes too many choices are a turn off. It should be easy to customize. A five-year-old user may have trouble with this unless customization is effortless.
Fourth, children should be given the option to browse or search by keyword. Keyword searching can be frustrating to children for a number of reasons, one of these being spelling. I have encountered this countless times with my students. When they spell the keyword terms incorrectly, the OPAC brings up zero results. I end up having to help them with this. Everhart found that “elementary school children consistently found information on topics that were easy to spell” (2005, p. 37). What a shame that there is so much information being wasted because children simply cannot find it due to their undeveloped spelling skills. It is my belief that all OPACs, no matter what age group they are targeting, should have a spell-check feature. This would help to eliminate some frustration, as well as, improve the quality of search results.
Will OPACs change in the future? Will we be able to make them more kid-friendly? What do you think will make a child more successful when using an OPAC?
Everhart, N. (2005). The research: OPAC searching [Electronic version]. Knowledge Quest, 33(4), 37-38.
Large, A., & Beheshti, J. (2005). Interface design, Web portals, and children [Electronic version]. Library Trends, 54(2), 318-342.
Robin, R. (2006). OPACs for children: Nine guidelines for design. Retrieved March 5, 2008, from http://www.salis.ubc.ca/COURSES/libr500/06-07-wt1/www/R_Robin-WWW/visual.htm
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3 comments:
I agree, OPACS should have a spellcheck feature, like when Google asks "did you mean..." I like the idea of making them visual as well. I always hear people saying they have children come up to them and tell them they know the color of the book, but that's it.
I blogged on a similar topic: Cataloging correctly for kids. Through my investigating I discovered the international childrens library or icdl.org. This site has searches that were actually developed by children. We use Alexandria here at my library, they allow students to search iconicly as well as key word searches. We do, however, have the spelling issue as well. Why doesn't someone come up with a better way?
Nikki
One more comment about Alexandria, they offer a product called sneak peek. Sneak peek allows the librarian to purchase pictures of the book covers, allowing students more visual options for searching.
Nikki
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