A preparatory research regarding on-line public access catalogues

A preparatory and systematic research regarding on-line catalogues has been made from October 1991 to March 1992 by a team associating the Centre de recherche de l'Ecole nationale supérieure des sciences de l'information et des bibliothèques, the Médiathèque de la Cité des sciences et de l'industrie, the Centre for interactive systems research of the City University of London, the GSI-ERLI society. This work has been carried out within the context of Parinfo (Programme d'aide à la recherche en information). The objective was to classify the questions conceming the Opac, subject of a wealth of professional and scientific literature, and to come to useful proposals for libraries and researches in information sciences. To succeed in this enterprise, the research team chose, with a systematic and critical analysis of specialized literature, to collect and analyse a corpus of real sessions made by the users of an Opac (Médiathèque de la Cité des sciences et de l'industrie).
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