Efthimiadis, E.N. "Searching behavior in the Giraffe ranked retrieval system." In: SIGIR '97: 20th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. Philadelphia, PA, USA: July 27-July 31, 1997. [Abstract]

The searching behavior and retrieval effectiveness of users of GIRAFFE, a partial match ranked retrieval system, are reported in this study. GIRAFFE is an X-Windows based interface to OKAPI that has been developed for conducting information retrieval experiments.

The issues studied included how end-users searched in a partial match environment, what steps did they follow, what difficulties (conceptual or technical) did they encounter during the search, and whether searchers with a library and information science background had different search behavior and performance to users without that background.

The Wall Street Journal and San Jose Mercury News databases of the TREC test collection and twenty-six queries from the TREC query set were used. Fifty searchers were divided into two groups, the LIS-group and the NON-LIS-group, with 25 searchers in each. The LIS-group comprised of graduate students, faculty and professional librarians from UCLA with a library and information science background. The NON-LIS-group was a mix of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and researchers from different UCLA departments without a library and information science background. Data were collected from 100 searches via questionnaires, structured interviews, participant observation and transaction logs. The results are analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively.

The research was conducted while the author was on the DLIS faculty at UCLA and supported by grants from the UCLA Academic Senate and SUN Microsystems.