It is now my suggestion that many people may not want information, and they will avoid using a system precisely because it gives them information.
Having information is painful and troublesome.
An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it.
Brice Austin LIS Graduate Program, University of Denver This is a preprint of an article published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), v.52 no.8, June 2001.
The Law In Context
Mooers’ Law, as he explains it, focuses on the "painful and troublesome" aspects of having information in hand and therefore feeling obligated to do something with it; in his estimation, given what he calls the "present intellectual and engineering climate" (1959b, p.1), the customer might just as well wish not to have the information, even if it is readily available. For, he notes, "If you have information, you first must read it, which is not always easy. You must then try to understand it. To do this, you may have to think about it"(1959b, p.2).
In the building and planning of our information handling and retrieving systems, we have tended to believe implicitly, and to assume throughout, that having information easily available was always a good thing, and that all people who had access to an information system would want to use the system to get the information. It is now my suggestion that many people may not want information, and that they will avoid using a system precisely because it gives them information"[emphasis his]. (1959b, p.1-2)
In the conclusion of his Seven System Models study, Mooers clearly states that, in a culture such as the one he describes, "the amount of use of a retrieval system depends upon the intellectual environment or social climate surrounding the system, and not upon the faults or merits of the system itself" (1959a, p.39).
The Law Out Of Context
Mooers’ Law, as it is now popularly perceived among what might be termed the "Information Community", focuses upon the effort that the user of a retrieval system must put forth in order to acquire the desired information. J. Michael Pemberton, ostensibly quoting Mooers, has restated this succinctly as follows: "The more difficult and time consuming it is for a customer to use an information system, the less likely it is that he will use that information system" (1989, p.46 ).
Roger K. Summit, Chairman Emeritus of DIALOG Information Services, phrases it another way: "Mooers’ law tells us that information will be used in direct proportion to how easy it is to obtain" (1993, p.16).
The Context of Environment
An environment in which "rewards, instead of punishment, go with not using information" (1959b, p.1-2).
He acknowledges, however, that "there are situations where the diligent finding and use of information is stressed and rewarded, and where failure to find or to use information is severely punished" and notes that "in such places, we can expect retrieval systems will be actively used" (1959b, p.2).
A Scale of Information Retrieval Environments suggests itself. On one end of the scale there are environments in which it is far more painful to have information than to not have it; on the other end the exact opposite is true.
Indeed, it might be argued that, as one approaches the midpoint of the scale, performance becomes the critical factor in whether or not the system is used.
Mooers’ Law Expanded
Mooers’ 1st Law: In an environment in which it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information in hand than for him not to have it, an IR system will tend not to be used.
Mooers’ 2nd Law: In an environment in which it is absolutely critical for a customer to have information, an IR system, no matter how poorly designed, will tend to be used.
Mooers’ 3rd Law: In an environment in which the trouble of having information versus that of not having it are fairly evenly balanced, system design and performance tend to be the deciding factors in whether or not an IR system will be used.