Solving Cold Cases

The Boston Globe today features in its G section a story on amateur web sleuths who help solve cold cases.  As soon as I saw the headline, I thought - Boy! would librarians be good at this sort of research.  But you also need to have the motivation.  Read the story if you think you might be interested.  There is some push-back from some police, who are uncomfortable at having amateurs involved in researching these cold cases.  Also, if you become serious about identifying unknown bodies from clues in the file, you will eventually end up looking at some gruesome images, and heartbreaking stories.

But I cannot help but think it would be a job where a librarian would excel, and would truly make a difference.  The folks involved have formed an online website and group, the Doe Network, where they communicate and share information that helps them solve cases, and just form a community.  The Doe Network website has lots of links, but notes on the home page that they are celebrating 11 years of work linking unidentified bodies to the missing persons in cold case files.

There is also a new National Institute of Justice database, apparently inspired by the Doe Network, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System or NamUs.  There are 3 components to this database:

1)  the Missing Persons database, where anybody can enter information about someone they have lost;

2) the Unidentified Persons database, where coroners or medical examiners enter information about bodies they cannot identify;  and, a recently added

3) Unclaimed Persons database, for dead persons who have been identified but for whom no family member, or next of kin have been identified to claim the body.

 The Doe Network has links to the NamUs database, and they obviously work to match the persons in the first 2 databases to identify bodies, and help bring closure to the families.  They may also help close the 3rd sort of cases by locating family members as well.

I think it takes a certain sort of person. The Globe article notes that many folks  in the Doe Network burn out, so they have a rotating crew.  Some few hang in there for a longer time, though.  Kudos to them!  

Can you find me that red book I used before?

Librarians are used to being asked for help like this (at least we USED to be asked for help like that). Now, apparently, computer researchers are finding that people interact with webpages the same way. Technology Review reports in an April 10 story by Erica Naone that searchers are more successful looking for web pages when they combine a search with information culled from their search history information with thumbnail images. Most people find colors and images much easier to recall than words or numbers, apparently. The new tool improves the search speed for retrieving pages from web history pages and web searching generally.

Jing Jin, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, has developed a new browser-history tool, which she and her colleagues developed after studying how people use their browser history. They demonstrated the prototype in a presentation this week at the Computer-Human Interaction (CHI 2009) Conference, in Boston. (snip)

The researchers tested users' ability to recall Web pages and found that URLs and textual descriptions (by which most browsers organize their history) weren't as easy to remember as colors or images collected from the Web pages themselves. So the researchers' tool--currently a plug-in for the Firefox browser--lets users browse images of websites that they have visited in the past, or type in search queries that find previously visited pages.

The researchers also used the new history tool to improve Web search, by adding thumbnails from browser history at the top of Google search results. The thumbnails were selected according to the search terms that the user entered into the search engine.

In testing, the researchers discovered that people could find the page they were looking for within about a minute on average using the prototype add-on, compared with an average of three minutes using the standard browser history. The user tests also showed that people were able to actually find a given old page more often with the prototype.

The article goes on to discuss other researchers who argue over whether search history pages need to be redesigned to improve usability. Some FireFox browser versions currently cull information from search history to guess at completing the URL a user is typing, for instance. And Google's Chrome now offers a "speed dial" option with thumbnail images of favorite webpages. All steps toward improving location techniques for those troublesome humans who have always based their personal recall systems on the color of the book or the look of the webpage. That's me, by the way, library training and all!