Mooers

Mooers' laws

Calvin Mooers formulated in 1960 his first "law": "An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it".

In 1972 he formulated:

"Mooers Second Law of Documentation.
In the same manner that color samples provide a test for the detection of color blindness in a person, the descriptor technique provides a means for the detection of the "word-bound" or "idea-blind" person. Such detection is important because a word-bound person may not be able to provide idea-based (word-independent) retrieval service of the kind which is most congenial and most desired by the non-word-bound part of the population".

Literature:

Mooers, C. N. (1960). Mooers Law, or Why Some Retrieval Systems Are Used and Others Are Not. American Documentation, (editorial), 11(3), p. ii.

Mooers, C. N. (1972). Descriptors. IN: Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, vol. 7, Ed. by Allen Kent & Harold Lancour. New York: Marcel Dekker. (Pp. 31-45).