Marcia Bates on Search Systems

The Informed Life

Marcia Bates is Professor Emerita in UCLA’s Department of Information Studies. Over the course of a long career in both consulting and academia, Dr. Bates produced seminal work in user-centered information system design. Her paper on “berrypicking” as a user search strategy has been widely cited and is considered a foundational text in the field. In this conversation, we discuss search systems.
Transcript
https://theinformed.life/2023/01/01/episode-104-marcia-bates-on-search-systems/

Show notes

• Marcia J. Bates Home Page
• Marcia J. Bates - Wikipedia
• UCLA Department of Information Studies
• The Design of Browsing and Berrypicking Techniques
• Selected Works Of Marcia J. Bates, Volume I
• Selected Works Of Marcia J. Bates, Volume II
• Selected Works Of Marcia J. Bates, Volume III
• The Contemporary Thesaurus of Search Terms and Synonyms: A Guide for Natural Language Computer Searching, Second Edition, by Sarah Knapp
• Boolean algebra - Wikipedia
• Carol Kuhlthau - Wikipedia
• U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)

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Chapters

1. Marcia Bates on Search Systems (00:00:00)

2. About Marcia (00:01:27)

3. Search is not done (00:04:39)

4. Better search and searching (00:08:57)

5. Librarian precedents (00:16:20)

6. Information-seeking vs. problem-solving (00:20:51)

7. Better searchers = less gullibility (00:25:54)

8. Closing (00:28:52)