Out of the Mouths of Middle School Children: I. Developing User-Defined Controlled Vocabularies for Subject Access in a Digital Library

Representation and retrieval obstacles within a digital library designed for use by middle school children are presented. Representation of objects is key to retrieval. Tools used to create representations for children’s resources, such as controlled vocabularies, need to be more age appropriate. Development of age-appropriate controlled vocabularies requires us to learn more about the ways children interact with systems and form search strategies to represent their information needs. Children’s search terms and questions are a rich resource for learning more about their information seeking process, their question state, and their formulation of searches. A method for gathering and using children’s own search terms and the benefits of their utilization in developing more age-appropriate controlled vocabularies are discussed.