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Information searching behaviour of Czech National Library of Technology users
Blažků, Eli ; Jarolímková, Adéla (advisor) ; Lipková, Helena (referee)
The goal of my bachelor's thesis is to find out how users of the Czech national library of Technology (NTK) search for information; and what are the challenges and limitations they face when using the information ecosystem of NTK. My research consists of a theoretical and a practical part - in the theoretical part, I review the literature, and define the core terms of information behavior, information literacy, and usability. I then use these to define the facetes of my research - the paradigm shift in library search engines towards "googlification", and the theory of information barriers. In the practical one - I do quantitative analysis of the most common search terms in the "Summon" discovery system NTK uses, and qualitative analysis of user session recordings combined with interviews about their experiences. My research showed that users of NTK mostly follow trends shown in the relevant literature - they use simple keyword searches, do not use boolean operators, stemming, or wildcards in their queries; their behavior mostly consists of simple alterations of their first keyword search. Those are typical symptoms of googlification - which is, they expect that the library search engine works in the same way as Google Search. My research also showed that Google Search can be a very effective tool...
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