“Studies of online catalog use and users have uncovered a pair of problems that seem to be endemic in today’s online catalog systems,” Ray Larson, a professor at Berkeley’s library school (or, as it is now called, the School of Information Management and Systems), wrote conclusively in 1991:These are: (1) a large percentage of subject searches fail to retrieve any bibliographic records; and (2) when subject searches succeed in retrieving records, they often retrieve too much material for the user to evaluate effectively.Larson cites an earlier study of his own in which he found that the average number of on-line records retrieved in his sample was 77.5, whereas the average number that users actually took a look at was 9.1. The “futility point” in on-line searches—the point at which you give up and go with what you have—is, because of screen fatigue and the lethargy of system response, much lower than in card-catalogue searches. The life of the mind suffers as a result.