Search in one’s hand: How users search a mobile library catalog

Abstract

With the rapid growth of mobile devices, mobile websites become an important channel of library resources and services. The mobile catalog is often significantly different from its desktop version in interface and features, but few studies of library catalog search behavior have been focused on mobile catalog searches. We present a study on user search behavior with a mobile library catalog based on transaction log analysis. We compared mobile and desktop catalog search behaviors and highlighted the similarities and differences, which could provide important evidence for improving mobile library catalogs’ search performance and usability.