Given the interest in the search sessions at MW2008, and the follow-up discussion on Seb's, Nate's, and Brian's blogs, i though it would be useful to summarize a bit of the reading i've been doing lately for the phd + steve.museum research.

Directly relevant, is a longitudinal meta-study of the end-user search literature by Karen Markey, published in two parts in mid-2007 [in english, she compared and analysed the results of a lot of studies, conducted over a long time: 25 years].

i've recently taken a look at a year's worth of search log data from the Guggenheim Collection on-line -- a pilot study for some work within the steve.museum project. I've attached a draft paper to this post -- comments are welcome! It's still rough in spots, but I need to step back.

One of our premises in discussing folksonomy in the museum is that allowing users to tag collections will improve their retrivability... but surprisingly, we know almost nothing about what searchers of museum collections really do. i couldn't find a single serious IR study in the museum domain. There's lots of literature about what we 'should' do, how standards will help and why controlled vocabularly is really important, with almost no evidence to support those claims. We need to look hard at the data.

Notable findings in the Guggenheim data:

I agree there is a need for Citation-specific searching of entries in the Research Forum.

Right now, it IS possible to search full citations including keywords as part of the entire site using the Search the MW on-line community link. Advanced Search also lets you limit your search to 'biblio' entries. Maybe I could link this in to the Research Forum page ...