Unfortunately many students acquire only a rudimentary competence in these skills. Attempts at formally teaching information skills have often been problematic. By contrast, students prefer to learn by attempting searches required for their own studies, by experimenting and from other users. This can be a very productive means of learning, but current systems provide little support for learning generic skills.

One cause of this lack of support is that current online databases emphasise product (the hits) over process (how to obtain the hits). Supporting the information search process implies: recording the entire search interaction, allowing a visualisation of the search, preserving information across sessions and allowing the search process itself to become a manipulable object.

Some of these facilities are partially provided by certain systems but typically an online database such as BIDS only records the search hits. Consequently, the record of good and bad search techniques can appear identical. Other systems, including most library OPACs, do not record the search process at all.

Our system, Ariadne, records users' interactions with an online database and preserves all of the available information about the search process. The resulting visualisation of the search history can then be used as an external memory, an aid to reflection and as a general educational tool. For example, searches can be edited, annotated and shared amongst users (in order to support collaborative learning) and librarians. We have tested the system on students from Computing, Chemistry, Psychology and Women's Studies, and report on our findings. The visualisation of the search process is both comprehensible to novices and can serve as a focus for discussion of classic searching errors such as reading through an excessive number of hits.