Written for IS580, 3/6/2005.
Dr. Marcia J. Bates received her B.A. at Pomona College, spent some time in the Peace Corps, and then went on to earn her M.L.S. and Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley. She has taught at the University of Maryland, the University of Washington, and has been at UCLA since 1981, where she has served as Assistant Dean and Department Chair. Dr. Bates also works as a consultant for commercial firms and government institutions. She is the recipient of several awards, including the Frederick G. Kilgour Award for Research in Library and Information Technology. She is quite the prolific writer and has published over five dozen papers in various journals, in the areas of information searching and retrieval, and user-centered information systems design.
In a paper she presented at the 53rd ASIS Annual Meeting 27 in 1990, Dr. Bates describes an online search engine with an integrated thesaurus designed for use by those with little to no experience with search engines and “to feel simple enough to be used successfully by end users with only a high school education, and which is linked to an online thesaurus in such a way as to allow easy selection of desired terms and automatic creation of Boolean statements.” (Bates 1990: 20) She wrote a number of papers in the pre-internet boom era regarding the way information retrieval systems online should be designed, including two published in 1989, “The Design of Browsing and Berrypicking Techniques for the Online Search Interface” and “Rethinking Subject Cataloging in the
Online Environment.” Dr. Bates is very keen on the pragmatic, user-centered system designs, although she has also done research on information seeking behavior of scholars and students.
However, Dr. Bates does not feel that online information retrieval has lived up to her standards; in 2002 she published “After the Dot-Bomb: Getting Web Information Retrieval Right This Time,” in which she lists the areas in which the programmers responsible for the large search engines have gone wrong. Primarily, in her opinion, this is by not consulting information science professionals, and spending their time “re-inventing the wheel” (Bates 2002) rather than checking if there was prior work already done in their subject area. Dr. Bates lists several ways in which Web information retrieval could be improved, such as using faceted rather than hierarchical classification and using a vocabulary intended for information retrieval rather than just whipping out Roget’s Thesaurus.
Most of the suggestions in “After the Dot-Bomb” were already addressed a decade earlier in various publications in information science, including those of Dr. Bates but as she mentions, Web companies designing information retrieval systems assemble teams of experts in their subject, but leave out the information professional: “no one who knows anything about information is brought on board” (Bates 2002). The topic of “re-inventing the wheel” is a recurring one for Dr. Bates; she mentions again in an address at the American Society for Information Science and Technology Annual Meeting, in November 2002, entitled “Conceptualizing Users and Uses,” that recent studies on chance acquisition of information have ignored the 1959 research into that same topic by Herbert Menzel. Dr. Bates concludes her speech with “take the trouble to make your own assessment of the work, and seek out the quality research, whatever its method or era.”
Dr. Bates addresses human-computer interaction in information retrieval in her paper “Indexing and Access For Digital Libraries and the Internet,” in which she discusses how information retrieval system design can be improved. She advocates a design based on real needs and behaviors of the user. “The really sophisticated use of computers will require designs shaped much more in relation to how human minds and information needs actually function, not to how formal, analytical models might assume they do” (Bates 1998: 1187).
Dr. Bates believes firmly that IS professionals should be at the forefront of the Internet information revolution. She believes that our potential contribution to IR on the Web has gone largely undervalued and ignored, and partly that is because the IS field has not stepped up to the challenge. Dr. Bates also believes focusing on books as library professionals is outdated, and that all types of media should have equal focus (Bates 1999). Her latest publications and speeches have centered on where she feels information science as a discipline needs improvement, in order to avoid perceived obsolescence.
Bibliography
Bates, Marcia J. "After the Dot-Bomb: Getting Web Information Retrieval Right This Time." FirstMonday 7 (July 2002) at http://firstmonday.dk/issues/issue7_7/bates/index.html.
Bates, Marcia J. "Design for a Subject Search Interface and Online Thesaurus for a Very Large Records Management Database." Proceedings of the 53rd ASIS Annual Meeting 27 (1990): 20-28
Bates, Marcia J. "The Design of Browsing and Berrypicking Techniques for the Online Search Interface." Online Review 13 (October 1989): 407-424.
Bates, Marcia J. Homepage. http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/
Bates, Marcia J. “Indexing and Access For Digital Libraries and the Internet: Human, Database, and Domain Factors” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 49 (November 1998): 1185 - 1205.
Bates, Marcia J. “Information Curriculum for the 21st Century.” Presented to the American Library Association Congress on Professional Education on May 1 1999 in Washington, D.C. http://www.ala.org/ala/hrdrbucket/1stcongressonpro/1stcongresspanelpresentation.htm
Bates, Marcia J. "Rethinking Subject Cataloging in the Online Environment." Library Resources & Technical Services 33 (October 1989): 400-412.