Enduser

Enduser

When commercial on-line databases were introduced about 1970 they were complicated and costly to use. Almost all searches were done by professional "documentalists", "information specialists" or "intermediaries".

1980s was the decade of the "end user." On-line catalogs (OPACs) and CD-ROM databases were widely and quickly adopted and became commonplace in libraries of all types by the end of the decade. In this environment, the user is both the primary searcher of the system and the user of the information it provides. Who better to target by researchers for assistance with system evaluation? The user became the center of attention in evaluation studies.

End-users may generally not be competent to search complicated databases in a way that identify the most important information. The concept of "end-users" is partly connected to questions on how to design systems for end-users as well as their needs for instruction and guidance.

Enduser is also a concept in computer science (e.g. end user programming) and other fields.

Literature:

Larsen, G. (1989). End user searching, a new challenge to the intermediaries. Information and Innovation: Beretning fra 7.Nordiske Konference for Information og Dokumentation 28.-30. august 1989, Århus Universitet, Århus.

Nardi, B. A. (1993). A small matter of programming; perspectives on end user computing. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press.

Pfaffenberger, B. (1990). Democratizing information; online databases and rise of end-user searching. Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall.

Poyner, A. (2005). Enabling End Users; Facilitating Effective Self-Help in the Information Age. Oxford: Chandos Publishing.

Ross, N. C. M. & Wolfram, D. (2000). End user searching on the Internet: An analysis of term pair topics submitted to the Excite search engine. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51(10), 949-958.

Sutcliffe, A. G.; Ennis, M. & Watkinson, S. J. (2000). Empirical studies of end-user information searching. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51(13), 1211-1231.

Yamaguchi, N. (1996). CD-ROM MEDLINE search method for end users. Tokyo: Southeast Asian Medical Information Center.

Yuan, W. J. (1997). End-user searching behavior in information retrieval: A longitudinal study. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 48(3), 218-234.