Usability, user preferences, effectiveness, and user behaviors when searching individual and integrated full-text databases: implications for digital libraries

This article addresses a crucial issue in the digital library environment: how to support effective interaction of users with heterogeneous and distributed information resources. In particular, this study compared usability, user preference, effectiveness, and searching behaviors in systems that implement interaction with multiple databases through a common interface, and with multiple databases as if they were one (integrated interaction) in an experiment in the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) environment. Twenty-eight volunteers were recruited from the graduate students of the School of Communication, Information, & Library Studies at Rutgers University. Significantly more subjects preferred the common interface to the integrated interface, mainly because they could have more control over database selection. Subjects were also more satisfied with the results from the common interface, and performed better with the common interface than with the integrated interface. Overall, it appears that for this population, interacting with databases through a common interface, is preferable on all grounds to interacting with databases through an integrated interface. These results suggest that: (1) the general assumption of the information retrieval (IR) literature that an integrated interaction is best needs to be revisited; (2) it is important to allow for more user control in the distributed environment; (3) for digital library purposes, it is important to characterize different databases to support user choice for integration; and, (4) certain users prefer control over database selection while still opting for results to be merged.