Mooers' Law

Mooers' Law is an empirical observation of behaviour made by American computer scientist Calvin Mooers in 1959. The observation is made in relation to information retrieval and the interpretation of the observation is used commonly throughout the information profession both within and outside its original context.

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.

—Calvin Mooers

Original interpretation

Mooers' Law, as detailed by Mooers himself, focuses on the idea that people may not want information, as it obliges them to study the information and come to an understanding about it. In this context, people will avoid an information system because it gives them information, and the "painful and troublesome" comes from possessing the information.

Out-of-context interpretation

The more commonly used interpretation of Mooers' Law is considered to be a derivation of the principle of least effort first stated by George Kingsley Zipf. This interpretation focuses on the amount of effort that will be expended to use and understand a particular information retrieval system before the information seeker 'gives up', and the Law is often paraphrased to increase the focus on the retrieval system:

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.

—J. Michael Pemberton

Mooers' law tells us that information will be used in direct proportion to how easy it is to obtain.

—Roger K. Summit

In this interpretation, "painful and troublesome" comes from using the retrieval system.

References

• Austin, Brice (June 2001). "Mooers' Law: In and out of Context". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 25 (8): pp 607–609. doi:10.1002/asi.1114. http://spot.colorado.edu/~norcirc/Mooers.html. Retrieved 2007-05-23.