Thoughts on Surveys (10/3)

Our readings this week included a few overview articles on methodology and several example surveys. Each of the myth's presented offered some different perspectives (and underlying motivations) and had different outcome goals.

I thought that the methods outlined in the SIG-CHI article were interesting but a bit vague. The best practices included were somewhat obvious (plan well, adjust structure of survey to situation, keep the context/situation of the user in the center of the survey, be polite) but I was interested to see the list of study methods (heavy emphasis on surveys). They did also include ethnographic style Studies as well as focus groups.

In contrast, the Bauersfeld article included three contextual-centric methods which seemed to seek a balance between observation tools and user imposition. I would expect that the use of cameras in such obvious ways would seem a bit imposing for the participants. They also point to a major bias in their methods towards the end of the article, stating that these methods all focus on software/system use and process/feature models. They might not be particuarly useful for open ended thinking or satisfaction style surveys.

The three survey examples (Library, Postal, Pret) provided some interesting perspectives. Pret's approach reminded me of the comments made in Popwicz's article regarding customer comment cards (more useful for getting initial contact than gathering data) and was clearly oriented towards being a giveaway than a survey. The postal service survey was much more serious and focused. I noticed repeated themes (quality of service, speed of service, courtesy of staff) repeated throughout different interaction environments. The structure of the survey remained fairly consistent and they did not confuse user demographics with opinions.

The Philadelphia survey drew some interesting conclusions (for 1990) but upon review of the survey it seemed that in contrast to the Postal service used 'loaded' questions that both combined several actions/perspectives into a single question and included biases about the contexts in which those actions would be taken. For example, one of the questions is 'I am interested in learning about a general subject area on my own. . .I came to the library today to find answers' In addition, they have the patron fill out a scale (not a reason to important reason) for a question that seems to be a yes/no. . .Another issue I had with the Philadelphia survey was the inlcusion of opinion questions in the demographic section, this would seem to confuse the type of data that they are collecting at different points in the survey.

In contrast to these brief user interactions, Solomon's article on an ethnographic study that spanned 3 years utilizes a number of tools (none of them surveys) to gather data about/from individuals. Solomon describes an immersive experience which included iterative review & consideration of the study both by the observer & observed. I was curious to discover to what extent the study participants agreed with/corrected perceptions of the observer and what impact the observation process had on the actions of the participants. To what extent does the researcher have to hide their true motivations inorder to not 'corrupt' the sampling process? The article about Nickelodeon gets to this point a bit in describing different research context where opinions are solicited without explanation of use. Is this an appropriate step to take?
I found myself comparing these Studies to the Libqual + study run by ARL (http://www.libqual.org/). While it is a survey, it is focused on standardization across libraries, and attempts to measure 'impact factors.' I have found the survey to be intolerable. It takes entirely too long and imho results in a low return rate due to user frustration. It does this in an attempt to get high quality data. Can we, as researchers expect much tolerance from research subjects? How does a reward system play into the gathering of data? I'm not sure, I just think that having experienced the LQP survey that it has gone too far in the opposite direction of some of the others reviewed this week.

Heard and interesting idea the other day

I was speaking with an IT person yesterday who mentioned the idea of using email headers to do an analysis of communication structures/patterns within an organization. He mentioned the fact that the headers would help not only trace person to person data but also email threads, order, etc so that you could pick a topic and analyze the evolution/distribution of information in it.

I did some quick reading at http://www.bath.ac.uk/bucs/email/anatomy.shtml and have to say am pretty intrigued by the idea. . .It is an example of a huge un-mined dataset .
A quick search in the ACM digital library for 'email header' returned 200 documents, the first few of which were directly related. one in particular called 'mining email social networks' from International Conference on Software Engineering archive Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Mining software repositories table of contents was right on topic.

As the week went by, I came across a few instances of the use of Email headers as an analysis tool. Apparently several studies have used them to track communication already. Is this a new type of data gathering (automated, system based, objective/qualitative) or just a twist on the sorts of observations that could be made in ethnographic studies?

A brief review of context based models of information discovery

I chose Kirsty Williamson's article, the "Ecological Theory of Human Behavior" to pursue for this assignment. I paged through several other articles in the process and found that a large number of them discussed in detail an information interaction "searching, chaining, browsing, interpreting", or attempted to map cognitive/psychological perspectives onto the process. In contrast, Williamson's article and related citations (Bates - 2002, Erdelez - 1998) seemed to take a more comprehensive approach. Williamson's article caught my in particular because she differentiated herself from more cognitive approaches including Dervin/Nilam, Belkin, and Kulthau.

I read three articles related to Williamson's theme of opportunistic and contextual information interaction which she bases on Patrick Wilson who "suggested that people find information unexpectedly as they engage in other activities." (Williamson, 128) Bates' 2002 article on an 'Integrated model for information seeking' and Erdelez's article on 'Information Encountering' provided complimentary perspective to Williamson's views. I chose Williamson's article on her study of information interaction among an elderly population in Australia for a fuller review of her Information Ecology theory. Her study involved both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the information interaction of 202 people through the creation of a telephone diary and in-depth interviews of the participants. Williamson points out that she took effort to research the participants within their context (living spaces, social networks, demographics) and that she was able to generalize some information behavior traits from this process.

I found her observations regarding the information acquisition behavior interesting. In particular, Williamson found that significant pieces of information were obtained 'accidentally' through social networks, media browsing (newspaper, television, junk mail), and family relationships. In many cases, the primary purpose of the interaction was ultimately irrelevant to the information direction pursued, indicating a much less structured approach to information seeking than that addressed in other literature.

Erdelez's 1998 article in the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science recounts her theory and research in the Information Encountering area. She groups 'information encounter' into four groups. Non-encounterers (people who do not recall an encounter), Occasional-encounterers (people who do not view IE significant or more than 'lucky'), Encounterers (people who recognize that they often IE, enjoy the experience but do not see connection between this and other info behavior), and Super-Encounterers (IE is an important component of information acquisition).

Based on Williamson's views, I thought that everyone should be a super-encounterer. It appears that in contrast to Williamson and Bates who emphasize the information seeking process in daily life, Erdelez is looking at the Information Encountering experience within the context of the directed search for information. Regardless, Erdelez discusses many of the same impacts as Williamson and Bates, lateral interest moves within an information seeking context, and cognitive and affective impacts of 'accidental' information discovery but differentiates information encountering from browsing/berry picking models that Bates & Williamson discuss.

Finally, Bates's 2002 article attempts to create a holistic approach to what she terms as the two approaches to user analysis literature (the Cognitive/affective and the biological/anthropological). Bates first focuses on the information seeking process. She states that her scope includes "all the information that comes to a human being during a lifetime " (3), and emphasizes that "For most people, most of the time, information-related behavior consists of absorbing and using the learning and information that comes our way during the course of our daily lives " (3). She continues with a brief discussion of the 4 modes of information seeking related to active/passive and directed/undirected searching (Searching (active/directed), Browsing, Monitoring, Being aware (passive undirected)).

Bates argues that based on the anthropological view of human existence, activities such as browsing, berry picking, and farming (a concept she explores in some depth) more accurately describe information discovery processes than more directed 'seeking' activities do. Bates uses concepts such as the principle of least effort and the idea of 'data enrichment' to discuss why individuals engage in 'farming' activities which build an informing context in which information is more easily obtained and incorporated into a personal information infrastructure. She concludes by naming the two sides of information seeking as sampling/selection and passive acquisition and argues that each approach considered (scientific, cognitive, social, anthropological) contributes a valuable component to the understanding of the process.

Within the context of the discussion of information seeking, I found Bates’s and Williamson’s remarks on the fluid nature of information seeking interesting. Both commented on the role that categorization played in the process and the problems that highly structured information systems introduce into these relatively unstructured/undirected seeking experiences. Bates asks "What happens when this propensity encounters the complex structures of libraries, classifications, metadata, and so on?" (9). She suggests that these highly organized systems are incompatible with the natural information seeking process which emphasizes browsing/berry picking/serendipity. In contrast, Williamson, in her overview article (reporting the findings of her research on information use of a breast cancer website) comments on the ability of the site to direct specific information to users based on their 'ecological' attributes: "information is being 'tailored' to user needs through a portal – by the provision of 'user-centric' resource descriptions and a metadata repository that links the self-selected profiles with specific information resources" (131).

A common theme in each of the articles included questions regarding the impact of technology on this process. While Erdelez found that 'Super-Encounters' avoided online resources in 1998, Williamson reported a lag in technology adoption for elderly populations in 2002, and Bates questions the use of structured systems in information interactions, all three mention the trend towards lower-cost information interaction that the web brings to these studies. In some senses, the web is based on the 'accidental discovery' model proposed in the above papers. The use of 'links' and user centered publishing models brings community participation to the fore-front where the previous studies could only analyze personal interactions on a small scale (person to person, person to mass-media component).


Works Cited

Bates, Marcia. 2002. Towards an Integrated Model of Information Seeking. In The Fourth International Conference on Information Needs, Seeking and Use in Different Contexts. Lisbon, Portugal.

Erdelez, S. 1999. Information Encountering: Its more than just bumping into information. Bulletin of the American Soiety for Information Science 25 (3).

Williamson, Kirsty. 1998. Discovered by chance: The role of incidental information acquisition in an ecological model of information use. Library & Information Science Research 20 (1):23

Williamson, Kirsty. 2006. Ecologoical Theory of Human Information Behavior. In Theories of Information Behavior, edited by K. E. Fisher, S. Erdelez and L. McKechnie, E.F. Medford, NJ: Informtion Today.

Research interests 9/12

In reading the article by Paul Cron on selecting research topics & developing an overall framework of research, I began thinking about all of the ideas that I have written down over the last year and was wondering whether or not some of these ideas work together, represent good research areas, and whether or not any of them are specific enough to warrant further consideration. I decided to put them all in this entry and attempt to group/sort them out. . .

1. The integration of Traditional MARC, Amazon, Google, Ebay and other vendor webservice provided data to create more rich data set for resource description. Started with idea to link to images in Amazon, grew to include migration of three standards to new MD scheme (MARCXML, AMAZONMD, QDC), representation of information in faceted contexts. I modified a small movie search page based on this investigation that harvests metadata from Amazon through their API & merges it with the MARC data for videos in the ZSR library catalog. The result was promising but I still don't see the 'question' here.

2. To investigate the notion that there is a gap between the information organization skills in a librarian and the common man (whether subject expert or not). Marcia bates presents this view in her paper - the invisible substrate of information science -. I have two projects in the works related to this idea, the Kent Mcconnell project and the digital Forsyth project both of which are involving having users perform cataloging on primary source material. How does this mesh with my research focus on how users approach raw metadata? The hypothesis is that users are becoming more data/information focused and less container/interface focused and that this shift is a natural transition reflected in the shift from print to e, from info as object to info as knowledge, from webpage to wiki? Is it that people bring information organization skills to an interaction and as a result, it makes little sense to prescribe an info organization rule on them via some interface ? that usability is inevitably caught up in providing a least common denominator approach to presentation? (think Google - which answers questions very easily but does not always encourage further development of new questions).

In the Dr. McConnell project, we are teaming with a class to complete content description of digitized primary source materials. 13 students will complete the description of 300+ articles selected by Dr. McConnell. Their description will involve some cataloging principles (verification of already entered data, application of structured headings) and will involve some unstructured description (application of topical refinements, entry of an open 'aboutness' description, definition of new headings). Fortunately or not the system lacks some Authority control at the moment but I plan to allow the users to collectively define Authority by building their own vocabulary list. How does this turn into research? Do I compare the work done by the students with the work done by our catalogers on similar resources? Do I compare their descriptions against the work done previously in indexing the resource? I am looking forward to discovering how much/what sorts of intellectual effort the students apply to this project.

The digital Forsyth project is in its infancy but is a collaborative project between libraries in Forsyth County. My vision is to not only build a collective library of digital resources but to enable user submission & tagging of these images. This project will be several years in the making.

3. How would you use collaborative tagging with iterative automation to build and refine controlled vocabularies? There has got to be a host of methods (automatic determination of hierarchy, processing of personal names, user based metadata tagging of concepts) to make this process possible. What if you gave the user tools to mark important concepts in the text (forget tags, give them an editing tool) like highlighting with different colors to represent tags. A highlight process that when stopped would allow you to pick which tag you wanted to associate with (author, title, subject concept, quote, etc).

I am hoping to try some of these methods on the Dr. McConnell project as we are emphasizing to students that they should follow their own descriptive ideas. I am hoping to be able to extract some good data from this process.

4. What automatic metadata generation functionalities are currently supported in Digital Library systems? Do these functionalities center on cross-application themes or are they specific to the application? What AMG functions do users expect/want & how would they use them? To what extent can AMG facilitate obtain/organize/present functions? A sub-question that came from this investigation is: What are the primary purposes of existing DL systems? How does their system orientation impact intended uses & workflows? Are these systems being designed within a single framework or multiple? What could research contribute to this process? Is this a situation like the ERMS/DLF initiative that would benefit from working around a central standard//framework? Are those guidelines definable?

I was fortunate enough to work on this project with Dr. Greenberg over the summer. During the project I reviewed ~6 open source digital library systems and at the least developed a foundation understanding of each system's workflows, design focus & base functionality. I am continuing this research with Dr. Greenberg in the fall.

5. In what ways do current information & library systems emphasize interoperability? What actions are enabled by data interoperability in these systems (data harvesting, resource identification, resource location, seamless service request, database building, time saving???). Is OpenURL a sufficient standard/technology to allow significant interoperability and user initiated data harvesting? What would a system built on interoperability centric standards (such as OpenURL & RSS) look like? What features would it have & how would it fit within current library system models? What other standards would be required? What features would it support? Does such a system represent a significant change in the approach of system use in research?

This question drove an evolving paper from my first semester in Dr. Greenberg's metadata class. During the investigation process, I designed & built a prototype system which emphasized the use of interoperability based standards (OpenURL, RSS, NCIP) in creating a central resource & service request system. The underlying idea was that the traditional ILS public applications still operated as endpoint silos where Internet based research required users to dynamically connect information from multiple systems. The system I developed emphasized the utility of the data rich linking capabilities of OpenURL and implemented resource obtainment & service request / delivery within this model. Some example services I included were, development of a temporary resource list, export of data in multiple formats (EndNote, RSS (XML), HTML), service request initiation from a data rich link, back-end resource availability resolution, back-end circulation functionality. The idea was based on the idea of merging OpenURL functionality (an application sitting between disparate search engines) and Metasearch applications (Single place to go for information). I stated at some point in the paper, that while Metasearch applications were fundamentally flawed because they started with homogenizing data that an OpenURL based meta-service application allowed the user to get Meta services with data rich links, putting centrality to the research where appropriate, not at the resource discovery level but at the resource management, procurement, and research-management process. I enjoyed working on this topic & actually got a publication & poster presentation from it but am not sure how to move further past the 'interesting idea' phase.
The article on Emotive cognitive psychology (Clark) discussed how good information systems changed the way people interact with information & make a higher interaction/achievement possible by providing some service that would otherwise consume a large amount of time/energy. While I suspect that this system serves this purpose, I don't know how I would test that idea. . .My suspicion is that as users are becoming more data aware they not only implicitly understand the idea of interoperability - they are starting to expect it.

6. How do individuals choose to integrate information systems into their work systems? What reasons do they have for either following the integrated model or choosing other systems in a more decentralized approach? What consequences does this mean for system design? This idea comes in part from the Cron reading today and was one that took hold. In my own experience, I have seen a wide level of adoption of information systems. More often than not, the large unwieldy information system fails a full implementation because it includes too many assumptions. it seems to me that smaller (necessarily interoperable!) components would represent a better structure. How is this studied though? Do i choose a type of system (say acquisitions departments in academic libraries) and investigate thier workflows & information systems use in order to see where/why they diverge? I suppose that this could be extractable to some model (probably already been done!).

7. And finally, In the 881 class I recently articulated an interest in discovering how users are approaching the use of data outside of traditional interfaces. My underlying thought is that as technology has developed that people are becoming more familiar with the idea of described data (meta) & are starting to expect not only user-centric design but actual access to the data. For instance, Banks now make xls & quicken exports available to their web-users, Google & Amazon offer APIs for anyone who is interested. This is based in part on the idea of remix culture & mashups and in part on the idea that the best interface/information system is the one that a person identifies/builds for themselves. I suspect that my interest in this might only be shared by others in my position & not by the more general user but am not sure.
I was thinking that some research in this area could include, a survey of data export/interoperability functionality for a given topic/function area and an investigation of the use of those features as well as a investigation of extended (non-traditional) uses of the data.

8. Related to the above concept is the idea that personal information management is a growing field. While this is not some area I know much about, I am wondering what approaches are being used in PIM scenarios. Is this an area (like privacy) that is ultimately difficult to pin down or is there some simple research that could be conducted.

Uncertainty principles & information systems 9/8

Kulthau concludes by stating that "the uncertainty principle proposes a basis for interaction into the process of learning from information enabling users to move from uncertainty to understanding " (352). I like the idea that information systems need to take the cognitive, affective, and ? areas.

She suggests that future research in the use of information is waranted (353), and an investigation of how systems respond at the 'problem' level (how does it figure out what the user's problem really is?) It seems that assigning this to a system is a daunting task, that users approach systems not with the goal of having it take them through the entire process of uncertainty to discovery but rather to aid in a particular part of the process. Perhaps the system that the user develops to aid them could be though of in this way, much in the way that I have a structured system for managing and marking up documents & readings. For me, this system is integral to the understanding/sensemaking process and I suppose that it counts as an information system, but I don't think that this process would have nearly as much meaning for anyone else? So, if systems ultimately cannot BE to tightly tied to the user, what design principles do we use? Interoperability, Portability, small Widget-style programming? I'm not sure, it seems that familiarity with the systems are in some ways taking precedence over the information itself in its application of new structure to that information (indexes, output formats). Is this a barrier or facilitation to discovery & use of that information?
I am left wondering how Chatman's article on 'life in the round' fits in. Both her article and Kulthau discuss the significant impact that emotions bring to the information seeking process, both describe information seeking processes that are iterative & confronted with problems like how users deal with un-expected information. If I understand Kulthau's constructivist methodology properly, she is approaching research on the information seeking process using quant/qual methods in an attempt to get to the cognitive and affective components of this process. It appears in contrast that Chatman used solely qualitative methods (interviews) to describe an idea of how users interact with information in certain environments. How does Solomon's 'mosaic methodology' fit into this group? He takes an interpretive approach of arranging the various actions of information seeking (starting, chaining, browsing, differentiating, monitoring, extracting, verifying, ending) for users/contexts into patterns (travelers, college students, professionals).

It is easy to recognize my own experience of information seeking while reading these articles, in fact discussion of the emotive components (wonder, frustration, interest level) but I am left wondering how much impact research on the emotional component of info seeking can have. Certainly it is useful in recognizing the state of the user as they approach the process but how would you define or change an interaction/system from knowing anything more about this other than the fact that you are dealing with a person? I'm not saying that these observations are obvious but that perhaps we are expecting to much from the information systems which tend to be designed to offer a simple/objective view of some information. Should the system provide different results based on how I feel?

Observations on the Solomon reading & other research ideas 9/7

Just quickly, in reading Solomon's article in which he mentions a study of college students use of information technology over four years in an attempt to discover how much it impacts their learning process, I wanted to take a moment to try to define another angle on the research questions that I have been tossing around. So, the base question is: In what ways has the growth of metadata definition and use within the context of publicly available information systems changed the methods and extent to which people manage their data? Are there academic examples (Endnote for example or openURL systems)? Are there personal examples (Financial records, Quicken, etc)? Is this a significant shift or merely a change in technologies? My underlying thought is that within the context of the library/information science world, the functionally being added to systems by including interoprable data models has the ability to have a significant impact on users. Perhaps not 'semantic web' but semantic user? I had thought through some other examples, including the changing nature of document generation/publication (term paper to website/blog), scholarly publication to 'data on the grid' publication, and wonder to what extent these trends would play into the embodied congnitive psychology idea proposed by Clark that users integrated with an environment undergo an (Strong word here) 'evolutionary' change in which the output is significantly greater than the output of an individual devoid of the integration of environmental factors? So Solomon's mention of the study on college students makes me wonder how I would study this population with this question in mind. Is it as simple as comparing the output of students who use bibliographic management software against those who do not? Is it an analysis of the formats of papers? Could I track the work of students who engage in an information literacy course and compare their academic careers against those who do not?
I like Solomon's research approach - a 'naturalistic collection' of facts including observation, task diaries, computer logs, documentation of the process, integrated with user interviews.

A Response to the weekly readings, questions about research interests 9/8

The host of readings for this week emphasized user centered theories of information use and interaction. The Mom & Me article, very clearly illustrated the concept of information seeking/use within the context of a user/situation. The article clearly pointed out issues of preferred 'ignorance' (Mom didn't care about consumer reports), decision making (Mom had her own criteria), Information/communication gap (difference between son & mom assumptions), and user perspective. These concepts were elaborated on in the other articles in more theoretical ways. Dervin & Nilan's literature review drove this point home with an extensive delineation between 'systems' oriented research and user oriented research. They outlined 3 user focused research methodologies (SenseMaking, ASK, User-Value) that all start with the user need and look back at their information seeking process. This article made me question whether or not the questions I have been asking in my research have been too systems focused and whether or not that is essentially a bad thing. As I mentioned in my opening entry, I am trying to understand/question to what extent users rely on data within a specific interface as opposed to data that is portable. Concrete examples of this are bibliographic citation management programs and data export, RSS feeds, and API interfaces to common applications (library elf for example). This semester I have begun gathering data on student use of two different interfaces for reserves at Wake. The two interfaces are 1)html based web page and 2) RSS feeds for the reserve courses. So my initial question was which 'system' would they use. Clearly this falls into what Dervin & Nilan would term a systems oriented approach. Perhaps after collecting this data I could begin to ask why they preferred one interface over another (familiarity, features, workflow). Another feature of user centered research that Dervin & Nilan mention is studying the specific or contextual user. I am concerned that the approach I have begun with again, studies only the demographic student (student in a particular course). While being able to find out if students from a particular course were more likely to use one interface over another is that getting to the 'user in context' or is it still asking a 'do they like the system' question?
I am not sure how the other two projects that I am pursuing (review of functionality of automatic metadata features in Digital library systems, and an evaluation of college student's categorization & description of primary source materials) need to be revised in light of the user/system centered question. The first seems inevitably system centered and really does not attempt to ask a deep research question. It is more a review of system functionality. Despite this, as I am attempting to conduct user surveys this semester to discover this information perhaps there are questions that I can ask - such as what kinds of AMG processing are relevant for given document collections, or what use/impact does AMG functionality have in specific usage cases. The second question (college student cataloging) seems to have more potential. I hope to study what choices the students make in their categorization decisions, how they implement structured and unstructured organization decisions, perhaps how they collectively use the cataloged information for their own retrieval, and ultimately how the description of this set of data is impacted by having 13 undergraduates perform the categorization.

I did not find the Johnson article particuarly useful, although it did detail several components of the decision making process. They tended (in my opinion) to use confrontational and biased language to discuss these issues and also emphasized a 'managerial' approach to decision making not an 'investigative' approach which recognizes the fact that users pursue information to satisfy real needs, and do not necessarily stop with only basic information, make decisions (or not ) out of fear, or control information to control others. In contrast, I felt that the Harris & Dewdney article did an excellent job of recounting these user traits and recognizing that there are situationally relevant exceptions (The user consults family members first except in sensitive cases, the user seeks convenient information except when the authority or comprehensiveness of the information is not high enough).

In general, this week was a useful re-cap of the user-oriented research that was introduced in the HCI course in the spring. Being able to come back to these ideas challenged me to re-focus and perhaps re-define my research interests.

Introspection 9/6

Although this is the second entry in the scrapbook it represents the first 'assignment.' I have considered a number of 'information situations' from the last week and have picked two to discuss.

The first stituation includes severl people in a working on deploying a rapidly developed course reserves application in library. In short there were three distinct groups, an application developer/project originator (someone who had the concept of the new reserves system and did the development & deployment), a faculty participant (the person who was contributing new data for this new version of the system), and the reserves system maintainer (the person whose job it is to make sure that course reserves function properly). The project was an extension of some discussions in which the faculty member and reserves system maintaner both expressed confusion regarding the nature and direction of the ideas being presented. Regardless, both expressed willingness to proceed and with some level of input the system designer developed and deployed the system within a few days. Shortly after deployment the system was demonstrated to the interested parties, adjustments were made and the project proceeded by 'going live.' Very quickly, it became apparent that the willingness to proceed by the faculty member had not been supported by any understanding of how the reserves system would work. Their assumption (I think) was that their syllabus would be replicated on-line with links to electronic versions of the course readings. In contrast, their syllabus was used as the base data for a dynamically searchable & sortable system which allowed users to both limit to specific course/week assignments and view the results in several formats. The faculty member did not feel comfortable using the page and subsequently ran into trouble demonstrating it during class. The ensuing email to the other parties expressed this high level of frustration and indicated an unwillingness to proceed with the project unless dramatic changes were made to the system.
Clearly, the communication gap between the developer (myself) and the faculty member on the initial design/function of the site led to a very high level of anxiety. As it turns out, the faculy members concerns were easily addressed and the problems that she identified were easily included in the page (as opposed to a complete redesign) indicating that we found common ground very easily despite a wide gap in understanding/communication/perspective. What proved to be a source of the confusion turned out to be how different parties had chosen to label specific reserve materials. Where the faculty member was very tied to the formatting of their titles/descriptions, the librarian had split these descriptions into multiple fields (title, composer, track number) and had made this data available in a different way. For both individuals, their interpretation of the information on the page seemed reasonable but ultimately led to a usability/understanding problem. I have not quite decided if the issue is related more to usability design or information organization becuase while the organization of the data had not really changed, the change in labeling created findability issues.

The second situation comes from my work in desigining a class on knowledge organization/searching for the library information literacy course. My goal was to encourage the students to think about & discuss the relationship between information organization & retrieval without getting too into theoretical specifics. As a result, I decided to choose common index engines (Amazon & Google) and have them discuss & compare what sorts of data they find in each and how they interact with each system differently. It seemed like a good enough idea and I could easily map out the topic but I wanted to be sure that my presentation contained elements that were easily grasped (images - I hoped, of Amazon & Google data structure & searching rather than text description). I found it curious that while I was seeking something that I knew to exist, had specific knowledge about, and had a detailed idea in mind, that it proved difficult to either find an existing image or construct an easily understood image. I worked for a few hours on this before ultimately deciding to use screen shots with highlighted sections from the page. Very early in the process frustration set in, simply becuase I had other elements of the class to work on and did not want to spend large amounts of time finding the 'best' graphic. Ultimately my decision to include something captured from an interaction with these search engines was based on a compromise between what I wanted and the enthusiasm I had for continued pursuit, and I suppose that while ultimately my satisfaction will be decided based on the feedback I get from the students, at the moment there is a fair amount of anxiety related to the use of the material.

Introduction 9/6

So, I have debated about how best to manage the 'scrapbook' for this course. I considered social software solutions (wikis, blogs, whatever), considred MSWord (given its robust document organzation and Endnote integration), open source info organization software (but felt unsure about dropping hours of implementation time into a new project just to get the first assignments of the semester off the ground). I decided that the debate for me centered on deciding the relationship between this creation of the document (the scrapbook) and the continuing value of it (the research process). Creating it in Word seemed ultimatley pointless since it would lock me into formatting decisions now that (in the html world) are best left separate from content. Going open source / xml seemed to be too much overhead and lacked the level of application integration that I was interested in. Social software seemed like a promising solution but there again, the Wiki is focused on easy user participation not on data management. So, I decided to try a modified use of bibliographic management software, in this case EndNote. I have become almost entirely dependent on EndNote to manage my course readings and research and thought that I should try to apply that organization type to the scrapbook as well. Using Endnote, I lose some document formatting abilities, but gain the ability to specifically control data contents and format, integrate observations with my readings & research, and leave the question of the producible format for later. There are disadvantages however, Endnote is windows based, meaning that in order to have ubiquitous access to this library I have to carry the data with me. Endnote only has limited support for simple markup of document text. Hence, my paragraphs might lack the style afforded by other applications. I have used Endnote in this fashion for several semesters in my Information Literacy course and have seen it used (poorly) in a previous instance as an archival information database.

My goal for the scrapbook then is to include both an ongoing commentary and an annotated bibliography integrated into a single document / application. Having written bulk export/import functions for other data, my hope is to decide on the format later in the semester. In order to help this work I am going to decide on some basic organizational tennants now. My comments will always go into Research Notes. The date of entry, formatted as yyyy-mm-dd will always go in a custom field: diaryEntryDate as it seems that chronological order is important. Title will be populated with an open text general description. At the moment I will use the keywords for any subject tagging that I want to do. This falls well short of my goal to integrate proper citation links within my comments to interesting articles but at the moment I will have to accept that. My goal with this project is to begin managing more of the research process here. At the moment, I do a good job tracking citations, but do a poor job tracking ideas, observations, potential areas of interest. I am looking forward to seeing how that progresses throughout the semester. One potential impact of this is that I would like to produce this scrapbook as an integrated project between 881 and 715. While ultimately I should be able to separate the observations, it would seem to be an artificial distinction.

In this spirit, I will leave with an observation by Marcia Bates in her article 'The Invisible Substrate of Information Science.' She argues that Information science professionals think more about 'a resource in terms of the features that matter to the organization and retrieval of it, rather than in terms of mastering the content" (Bates, 1046). She continues by arguing that subject specialists lack this trait and as a result are less qualified that IS professionals in this regard. I have to admit that while I see value here, this concept flies the face of folksonomy based organization, semantic web, and in many respects 'user' centered design. In fact, it seems to be a somehwat condescending approach towards non IS people to assert that these skills are more valuable than content knowledge/subject understanding. On the other hand, I have seen first-hand the truth in this assertion. Just recently on two faculty cooperative projects, the failure of the faculty member to entirely grasp the importance of relating their description of a thing with the file name of the digital object they were describing resulted in hours of cleanup work. But while their efforts needed some information organization guidance, the intellectual componenet that they brought to these projects (one an effort to more accurately catalog and represent electronic reserves and the second an effort to get history students describing (not organizing) primary source material) was invaluable (more so than organization?). In fact, I had one professor refer to me as a 'technician' and while the assignment of that tag was in some ways offensive I have to also recognize that I was the one applying the organizational system to her intellectual output so in many ways it was an accurate description.