University-based research adds an important dimension to our research agenda, and these projects promise findings that should be of broad interest to the library and information science community.
Gopher is an example of a commonly used protocol for searching networked information.
Although the use of networked information is proliferating at an astounding rate and is providing unprecedented access to information, the organization of this information has not kept up with its use. Likewise, there is need for a greater understanding of information searching in order to design better searching tools, organize networked information more effectively, and assist information providers in the mounting of networked sources. There has been little research on how people use Gopher, or its effectiveness as a searching tool. The proposed project will study Gopher users' information searching behavior, identify patterns and problems in the searching behavior or with the information retrieval, and recommend changes for improvement. The methodology employed will be descriptive survey research of a random sample of bibliographic families from the Online Union Catalog and qualitative examination of the most complex families to assess the efficacy of the conceptual model.