The participants comprised eight people from the London Business School and three from other colleges. Of the LBS participants, two were PhD students, three were Masters students, one was studying for a diploma and two were members of staff. In age, the participants ranged from under 26 to over 45.Most people (seven) were aged 26 to 35.
Seven were in the habit of consulting the LBS library catalogue at least once a week, with two using it less than that and two never having used it. All were familiar with computers, with nine using word processing software and eight using e-mail every day. Every participant had at least used a word processing package and the only items of software that most people claimed never to use were games!
Before they started their search, participants were asked what topic they intended to search for, and a note was made of the the query which they actually entered. Of these queries, seven were what the experimenters agreed were two-word phrases: ``supplier partnerships'', ``human capital'', ``stochastic calculus'' and so on. Three were single word queries: ``chaos'', ``German'' and ``forecasting''. The remaining query indicates a participant who did not understand the nature of the system. He described the topic he wanted to search for as ``economics'' but typed in ``author'' at the query entry box, clearly attempting to search for a book by author name.