Here is a simple question with profound implications: is library search the same thing as the “search” in the way the population at large understands search or Googling?

The question is very simple and one that I think has been in the back of my mind for quite some time, but I just read an excerpt on statelessness on the Web from RESTful Web Services that provided me with a new way to frame the question. Richardson and Ruby write:

When you ask for a directory of resources about mice or jellyfish, you don’t get the whole directory. You get a single page of the directory: a list of the 10 or so items the search engine considers the best matches for your query. To get more of the directory you must make more HTTP requests. The second and subsequent pages are distinct states of the application, and they need to have their own URIs: something like http://www.google.com/search?q=jellyfish&start=10. As with any addressable resource, you can transmit that state of the application to someone else, cache it, or bookmark it and come back to it later. (emphasis added)

Here the user behavior seems to be: “Hey, Google, show me whatcha got for jellyfish.”

When I go to my library’s catalog and search for the word jellyfish I think my behavior is different because my expectations are different. I am not expecting the top 10 items on the topic. I am instead doing two different things:

1. First, determining whether anything exists on the topic at my library
2. Second, retrieving and evaluating a list of these items if they do in fact exist

The difference is that of course Google will have information on a topic because Google aggregates everything (or so it goes in the popular consciousness). The library on the other hand should have something on your topic if your topic serves one of the known collection areas of the library. Understanding the stateless nature of the Web seems to bring this out. The following URIs do not reveal the same state:

1. http://www.google.com/search?q=jellyfish: what are the ten best resources about jelly fish according to Google
2. madcat.library.wisc.edu…Search_Arg=jellyfish…: how many, if any, resources about jellyfish does my library have

In designing the interfaces for a library catalog front-end, it would be important to be mindful of this distinction since you are answering two very different questions.

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