Stories that Illustrate User Needs or Problems
The study yielded the following priorities for the Libraries’ online tools:
- Make discovery easier and more effective
- Incorporate trusted networks in finding tools
- Continue to put links to the Libraries’ services and resources where the users are
As a qualitative approach, a cultural probe tends to generate creative thinking and insight related to a user group’s behavior, rather than statistically significant data results. Nevertheless, results can be coded and analyzed to suggest trends and to move beyond impressions and anecdotes, bringing a larger pattern of behavior into sharper focus.
"Now the student's created software that scans list of contents, fetches the site, parses descriptions of articles from the descriptions given, and prints titles and it asks him, do you want full text or the abstract? The program queries him about 80-90 articles per week and combines the result into digest form.” – Interview notes, Physics graduate student
- My notes: This seems to indicate a need for a way to automate search tasks for a specific topic, useful to ph.d. students
Key implication: The Libraries could meet the vast majority of user needs by focusing on services that support four core areas: research, publication/presentation, coursework, and current awareness.
Even so, many students mentioned that they automatically went to certain resources because they had used them before or because someone they trusted recommended them.
- User need for trusted networks, trusted resources, trusted people, etc., is a user need that we have not met
in the interviews, several graduate students voiced discomfort and a lack of confidence about knowing where to start for finding information about unfamiliar topics. Sometimes, even if they discovered an appropriate resource to search, the poor usability of the interface impeded their ability to locate useful information even though what they sought did exist in the tool.
- User need for paths ? or trusted methods for unfamiliar topics; anything we can do to improve interfaces
- "Key implication: It appears that the more complex and ill-defined the information task, the more the graduate students in the study relied on familiar resources and contacts to guide them to answers, yet the final result was a lower rate of success. The data suggests that graduate students could benefit from having tools and information that would allow them to expand their network of trusted resources rapidly when confronted with difficult information seeking tasks." (my itals)
Key implication: Undergraduate topical searches often required overview, or high-level, treatments of topics, which are difficult to locate with current library systems.
- User need for overview, high-level treatment of topics, and easier way to locate
“In trying to locate a paper by a colleague, the student knew it should be on her work group’s web site. It turns out that it was published in a journal and so wasn’t there. She searched his name on the work group site but there were too many papers by him. She needed another way; and so went to Google Scholar. She was working from home; and so couldn’t get into the journal website. The next day, she walked into her advisor’s office (he’s the coauthor). He gave her a copy.” – Interview notes, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science graduate student
...
- Idea of frustration of not finding something physical, need for clarity
Key implication: Resources which are quick and easy to access from the students’ locations are more likely to be used.
Fast access to any material was definitely a value for many participants in the study. Relevant anecdotes abounded in the interviews: students preferred links on a web site to “FAST stats” and were impatient that a faculty member hadn’t scanned and posted all his/her publications back to the 1970’s on their web site.
Key implication: Quick and effective services for print material could make it as valued as digital content.
"It is useful to find a little bit of info that he needs quickly without having to go get a book. For more complex things or if he hasn’t seen the information before, he prefers getting the book. ... He prefers books to articles because a book is more complete and in depth. With articles, portions aren’t included, and he has to track down references.” -- Interview notes, Aeronautics and Astronautics graduate student
******** browsing collections, page 16
graduate student
“In looking for a piece of information on a general topic, with no author/title/subject in mind, he wanted to thumb through a book -- any of a number of books would do -- that would have a couple of standard equations he needed. He knew such books existed, but it was not ‘something a whole book would be about.’ He knows where in the physics section in the Science Library (SL) to find the correlated electron systems materials. He stood there for a bit, thumbed through some and found one that worked.
Next, he went to the reshelving truck by the elevator in basement. He found multidisciplinary, newer books. He figures that many are new and all have been consulted.” – Interview notes, Physics graduate student
- Idea that books have a different value than articles, must be considered differently. Perhaps teaching should include ways to find info about books that relates to serendipity?
“He knows from the workshop and from [the librarian] that the Libraries have a lot of good resources but he doesn’t know how to pick the one he needs. Workshops are good, he says, but he forgets what he learned two months later.” – Interview notes, Sloan School graduate student
... one student spent several hours searching individual university library catalogs rather than WorldCat and another student wasted hours searching for specialized market research in Google as well as a news database provided by the Libraries. These students were not aware of more appropriate resources in the Libraries so relied on trusted resources from the past.
- Importance of trusted network. We may try to generate trust through instruction, but it does not stick when it's unrelated to immediate needs. Trust is more important than relevance.
“Student really likes and finds very helpful, Amazon’s reviews, the graphics, and the ability to look inside and view contents. She also likes to use the links to similar and related titles as a discovery tool. Once she has identified some interesting citations in Amazon, she looks them up in Barton to see if she can get them from the library. ... She likes Amazon “as a search feature,” and uses it as an entrée to library holdings.” -- Interview notes, Aeronautics and Astronautics undergraduate
“He returned to Pubmed to learn about the toxicity of the chemical. He learned about Pubmed through a friend of his roommate, who had made a comment like ‘is your paper on pubmed yet?’ He was driven to use Pubmed since it has a lot of medical information. Google Scholar was more effective for him to get the full text of articles. He can add the word ‘medical’ to his Google Scholar search and get the same results. ... He doesn’t use very many other databases.” – Interview notes, Mechanical Engineering undergraduate
In the use of library-provided information, a huge variety of specific resources were mentioned. In many cases, when asked, the students could recall how they learned about specific ones. Many learned about the resources through personal recommendations from faculty or other students. A minority found resources through using a variety of discovery methods, including browsing Vera or physical collections.
There were many cases where the students used trusted tools in order to evaluate particular items they sought. For instance, for a particular book, students would look at Google Print or Amazon in order to view the table of contents and the first chapter to figure out if the content of the book would ultimately be useful to them. Also, they used tools like Google Scholar to see who had cited the book, both as a discovery mechanism for additional related works, and also to evaluate the credibility of the material.
When confronted by the vast array of tools available to them, the students often exhibited uncertainty about what to do next and often reverted to tools with which they were familiar versus digging deeper to understand how new tools could be more effective.
- Again, the emphasis is on the trusted network of people, or known resources.
“She uses Google often. She volunteered that she does not use reference librarians at all, and she is not sure why. She has ‘never really felt the need to use reference librarians.’
[later...] Talking to people worked really well. She notes that it is ‘much easier to go to people who have direct knowledge, like the Starbuck’s manager’...than to struggle with search strategies and databases.” – Interview notes, Sloan school undergraduate
Several students mentioned that it never occurred to them to ask for help from librarians, while several others believed that they would be bothering the staff or would be perceived as not knowing what they were doing, if they asked for help.
- People are critical to the users, but librarians are not.
“After she looked at individual journals, she started going through databases in Vera. This is where she feels her work ‘started to break down.’ If trying to be thorough, she uses a keyword and searches with this through all of them. She goes down the list in the subject grouping of databases for Urban Planning. She believes that this is ‘not the best way.’ She says she doesn’t know how all the databases are different but they all turn up different articles on her keyword searches. She uses the descriptions in Vera to do some weeding from the list, and says that these descriptions are very important. She also worked her way down the list of databases in the Architecture subject grouping.” -- Interview notes, Urban Studies and Planning graduate student
- Example of user's steps taken.
“She did a quick web search on Google to look for a synopsis of this work. She notes that she also found an interesting bibliography that links her to ‘way too many other books.’ ... She mentions Amazon as another possible source for finding synopses. While reading, she often goes to Google to look up books, programs, citation patterns, etc. that are mentioned in the reading. Based on the synopses, she decided to get this particular book.” -- Interview notes, Urban Studies and Planning graduate studentnotes to self: organize this page, putting stories in one area, then separately make list of unsolved user needs, key implications