• Scholars seek, first and foremost, as clear and as extensive an overview of all relevant and important sources as they can achieve.
• Scholarship is necessarily iterative, proceeding in successive steps that change depending on feedback provided by previous steps; it cannot all be done “seamlessly” through “one-stop” single search boxes, nor can it be done by progressively refining initial sets if those sets themselves have been created with the wrong keywords to begin with.
• Scholars are especially concerned that they do not overlook sources that are unusually important, significant, or standard in their field of inquiry.
• Scholars especially wish to avoid wasting effort, or “re-inventing the wheel,” by duplicating research that has already been done.
• Scholars wish to be aware of cross-disciplinary and cross-format connections relevant to their work—but they also do not wish to be misled by “seamless” searches whose many trade-offs and blind spots are concealed from them by impenetrable “under-the-hood” programming. (They especially wish to avoid searching so many different sources at the same time that the resultant retrievals are overloaded with thousands of irrelevant “noise” or “junk” hits.)
• Scholars wish to find current books on a subject categorized with prior books on the same subject, so the newer works can be perceived in the context of the existing literature—not just in connection with the much smaller subset of titles that happen to be currently in print.
• Advanced scholars also wish for similar categorizations of English and foreign language books—i.e., they want subject searches to retrieve relevant materials in all languages together, so that a worldwide context of resources on their subject can be easily discerned. They do not wish to be straitjacketed within retrieval systems that are good only for finding English-language sources.
• Scholars particularly appreciate mechanisms that enable them to recognize highly relevant sources whose keywords they cannot think up in advance to enter into a blank search box. (Such recognition is often a function of prior conceptual categorization of keyword-variant sources, rather than relevance ranking of only those sources containing the exactly specified keywords.)
• Although they are more cognizant of the need for diligence and persistence in research, and of the requirement to check multiple sources, and of the need to look beyond the “first three screens” display of any retrievals, scholars also wish to avoid having to sort through huge lists or displays—from any source—in which relevant materials are buried within inadequately sorted mountains of chaff.