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The Getty Art History Information Program carried out a two-year project to study how advanced humanities scholars operate as end users of online databases. Visiting Scholars at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica, California, were offered the opportunity to do unlimited subsidized searching of DIALOG® databases. The second report from the project analyzes how much searching the scholars did, the kinds of search techniques and DIALOG features they used, and their learning curves. Search features studied included commands, Boolean logic, types of vocabulary, and proximity operators. Error rates were calculated, as well as how often the scholars used elementary search formulations and introduced new search features and capabilities into their searches. The amount of searching done ranged from none at all to dozens of hours. A typical search tended to be simple, using one-word search terms and little or no Boolean logic. Starting with a full day of DIALOG training, the scholars began their search experience at a reasonably high level of competence; in general, they maintained a stable level of competence throughout the early hours of their search experience. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Siegfried et al. (Tue,) studied this question.