There is a need to understand more about children’s information-seeking abilities, as many countries are trying both to improve public school education in high-technology  areas  through computer-based science programs and to link libraries and classrooms to the Internet. The authors of this paper asked themselves some serious questions that will eventually lead to increased understanding of the way children seek information. These questions, which also formed a basis for their experiments, are:

• How do children search for topics in computerized catalogs?

• Can children browse effectively by using a hierarchical recognition-based system?

• Are children able to use a keyword retrieval system effectively?

• How does search behavior vary between browsing and keyword systems?

• How well do children like to use browsing or keyword retrieval systems?

The authors found that children were able to use keyword search more effectively and more quickly than anticipated. They also found that the browsing system is dependent on the clarity of the catalog structure. There might be a lesson here for Web content creators.

I recommend this paper. It is my impression that all computer users--children and adults alike--face some of the same obstacles (and experience some of the same pleasures) when dealing with computers. As Kay puts it, the measure of any computer system is whether children can use it.