The tour & catching up . . .

After a few days of downtime after Tuesday's assignments I finally got myself back into work on Saturday morning. I have been struggling with the growing size of the tour topic (which once focused on a specific project and now threatens to include a recap of learning styles, information seeking models, and organizational models). Following the discussion on Tuesday I went back and read some Kuhlthau and sure enough there was some good connectivity with educational theory. In fact, I kept seeing those connections in some other articles so the expectation that I had that these connections were not being made at all was not on target. . .

At the moment I am trying hard to round off this project and get it into presentable form.. .I can comment that none of these learning/info seeking models address what happens when the info seeking runs against a deadline or imposed structure. ..senses of frustration, boredom, and the corresponding pressure that gets created when there is a gap between the need to 'complete' an investigation while much of the information is still leading in new directions.

Joining research & practice 11/14

Perhaps it is because my focus has been on other work (881 mini review & tour topic) over the last few weeks that I could not get that excited about the two readings today. While I found the visual interface article interesting it failed to spark any new thoughts/perspectives. Likewise for Dervin's comments which - despite being laid out in easy to digest propositions, seemed rambling.

Having spent the last two weeks reading about educational psychology, teaching methodologies, and their answers to information seeking/use/learning questions I am left agreeing with Dervin's assertion that the split in sociology based fields is undermining the efforts and credibility of researchers and work. Why does IS literature not mention any of the psychologists & philosophers that the Education field does (and vice versa)? The perspectives of Piaget, Bruner, Vygotsky, and Dewey seem to lay the foundation that Bates, Dervin, Chatman, Kulthau and Belkin use in formulating their models. Why isn't there any cross-over? The education field has taken these concepts and created practical teaching methods (I have concentrated on constructivism and inquiry based learning) from these models. Has the Information Science field gotten that far in using information seeking models to inform search systems?

Exploring connections between Education and Information Science literature

As research through Inquiry based learning, problem/project based learning, education & cognitive learning theories has progressed I am finding that the topic is getting larger rather than smaller. It is interesting to see how ideas from Piaget, Vygotsky, Bruner, and Bloom are central to the ideas presented in IBL literature. I am curious as to why we do not see these works referenced in informaiton science literature. Many of their theories (Vygotsky & Bruner in particular) show an emphasis on social & interactive development that is central to Chatman & Dervin’s information seeking theories. Favorite quote so far. . ."To perceive is to categorize, to conceptualize is to categorize, to learn is to form categories, to make decisions is to categorize"- Bruner as cited by Anderson (http://facultyweb.cortland.edu/~andersmd/cog/bruner.html). This idea, also stated by Vygotsky in his discussion of the adaptation of the individual to they symbolic systems of society gets back to the work of Lakoff, Johnson, and Patrick Wilson and yet, looking through reference lists, the two areas never seem to interact. The concept that learning is the application (or adaptation) of organizational & symbolic systems on experience (Bruner/Vygotsky) seems to be the exact ideas expressed by Lakoff/Wilson . . .Am I missing some connection here?

Catching up - late semester projects & the tour. . .

I have been a bit lax in posting over the past week but only due to the rapid pace of school & work related items. In fact I have made some good progress. The mini-review I for 881 is in final draft, the tour topic for 715 has solidified & I am focusing on reading/review at the moment. On the work side of things catawiki (http://wiki.zsr.wfu.edu/catawiki) got off the ground, and the strategic planning process is moving forward. If I can just push through DigitalForsyth &the second Mini Review (881), I can focus on a quiet December!

In short. . .Some good advances in a project a WFU regarding the hist390 class and the stumbling (by myself) across an article which mentioned an educational foundation for the work that class has been doing has me going off in a direction on my tour topic. I am glad to have a concrete thing to look at, rather than a more nebulous 'topic' which was quickly threatening to break my will to write literature reviews...

The topic, how digital libraries support inquiry based learning styles, is the outcome of a seemingly simple project that started in the fall - the goal of which was to 1)educate students in a history research on primary resource research adn 2)help build a digital library from an emerging-expert perspective. There have been lots of ideas from the library end on how to look at the project, from a suggestion that we evaluate the quality of the metadata to ideas surrounding looking at how the students feel about the process. I created a simple survey designed to get some qualitative feedback & hope to compare it against the data/logs (for some quantitative data). It may be hard to get to student motivation, but at least perhaps we can find out something about what they thought about the experience.

Through reading, i have been intrigued with PBL & IBL - it has been nice to read in another field (the ideas seem new & not so obvious!) I may still struggle with integrating some of these ideas but have the idea that these learning styles really describe (from a slightly different perspective) the information seeking styles we looked at early in the semester. . .

Thoughts on Time/Timing. . .

The readings from this week(10/31) focus on the impact of time/timing on information use. Solomon provided two articles that discussed some issues related to how users change over time (particularly the evolving behavior of the children searching the OPAC) and what impact time has on the information seeking process. The third article by Taylor lays out a framework for defining information use by professionals and does include time/change as a component of that definition. I was left wondering how successful Taylor was in pursuing this research over the course of the last decade and whether or not anyone found his definitions relevant. In retrospect, I wondered how some of the seemingly artificial distinctions (focus on 'active' information seeking, structured definition of goals) would impact the relevance of the research. Taylor seemed to be building on Dervin/Nilan's work though and mentioned some important concepts which have been reflected in more recent research, notably the idea of context and the concept that 'problems change over time'.

In relation to the time/timing articles Solomon asks a few questions. 'Why gather data over time, what does it give us?', 'How is time incorporated into methods, frameworks, theories?', and 'where would a time based perspective lead us?'. Clearly longitudinal studies appear to give us some valuable data about how users 'change' over time. Solomon was able to observe the learning of the elementary school children' use of the OPAC by introducing a time element to the study where a single point study might have missed important interactions/learning actions. Taylor mentions an important point though in discussing how problems change over time. Given the difficulty that a researcher would have in defining a single point of a user/problem, I would imagine that preserving/updating that definition over a longitudinal study would prove difficult.

A number of the cognitive/affective theories include some idea of change in state of the user (iterative seeking actions, the result of 'realization') but do these count as 'time' based? For instance, does Dervin's gap succeed in describing a discrete moment as well as a long term wrangling with a large issue? Is the issue on the other side of the gap static in Dervin's model? What about Bate's berrypicking model? While it is easy to infer a time component there (berries tend to be picked individually or in small groups after all), does the model ever revisit the user state, problem definition, or think about changing solutions?

In relation to the tangible concepts of metadata/technology that have been discussed at LITA, how have the solutions that are being discussed (new types of OPACs, internet site archiving, web 2.0 technologies) addressing the impact of time on the user/question/solution? An interesting discussion in a session about how to use Worldcat as your local catalog (implications for staffing, user seeking, etc) revisited the idea that libraries have had a flawed user model to base their ILS on for some time. There was a significant amount of frustration in the room regarding possible solutions, conflicting ideas of who/what the user is/wants, and the best/most efficient/most permanent way of addressing these needs. What was interesting was a concept which was universal here but not openly discussed: the impact/conflict that the different timelines of the web and library world are having on the ILS. In the commercial/open web world, technologies & indexes come and go in six months. In the library/bureaucratic world, technologies / indexes are multi-year/decade investments. The assumption in the room was that our users were changing at the web rate of time, while libraries were (by comparison) standing still. As a result, the group discussion wound around the idea that we had to do something quick (taking little time to define best solution was, and recognizing the idea that in web 2.0 solutions move on a much faster scale). Is there an issue here with the idea of non-normal time progression? When we discuss time in these senses, the discussion does not center on measured time but rather perceived state changes/events which only occur as time moves.

Let's think Internet archive for a moment & the impact of time. The IA looks to separate content from a timeline (and marks it) for posterity. In this way, they help define state/sense in a way that perhaps other information sources cannot. In relation to the mechanisms of social software in use now, the Internet Archive, is providing discrete snapshots of user states (however well defined) that are not susceptible to the changing vagaries of the web. Does this introduce a new research methodology?

Two articles & some further tour topic thoughts

The previous entry discusses some readings on digital libraries & some potential tour topic questions. ' The varying definitions of digital libraries (collection vs service, resource access vs resource organization and storage) are underwritten by differing definitions and assumed perspectives of a typical 'user.' How can the real perspectives and context of the digital library user be studied? Are there contexts/traits/actions that define a user differently in a digital environment than traditional environments?"

In doing some quick research in IEEE, ACM DL, and Cambridge Sci Abs on digital libraries & social/user components I came across a number of articles that addressed user perspectives. An interesting book from 2003 (yet to be retrieved) may provide a good definition of the topic. So clearly this topic is not new and the questions asked are still a bit too broad. I selected several articles to read and wound up choosing two which seemed promising. The first article, by Catherine Marshall and Sara Bly "Sharing encountered information: digital libraries get a social life" turned out to be a study in how/when/for what purpose people share encountered information. The study focused in part on digital libraries but really centered on the contexts of information sharing. They concluded with several interesting observations regarding the impact that digital library design has on sharing behaviors.

The second article I selected by Nancy Kaplan, Yoram Chisik, and Debra Levy "Reading in the wild: Sociable literacy in practice" described a research project which sought to create an online reading club of middle school aged children using a system called Alph. The online system included both a digital copy of the book to be read and a suite of annotation tools that were designed to give the participants 'community building' interactivity. The study used 5 participants who agreed to use the electronic experience rather than reading the book in print. Given the small number of participants, the study was not able to generalize some findings due to the fact that the behaviors noted could be attributed to one or two individuals. In particular, 2 individuals reported having less than adequate access to a computer and another proceeded through the book so fast that there were no other individuals reading those sections when they were.

The study did find that the participants stayed focused on a traditional linear approach to reading, that they made extensive use of the annotation tools, that the annotations were on-topic with the book being read, and that overall, reactions to the social components were positive. The study also found though that there was little 'community building' in that there were few responses to annotations, that users did not spend much time searching for other's comments, but concluded that this may be due to the limited survey population.

I found this article to be an interesting study if only because it attempts to use a technology to enhance traditional library reading programs. The article concludes by asking whether "Re-envisioning reading and re-inventing the book may bring a generational divide into sharper focus"(104). This idea refers to an assertion that the nature of reading & interaction is changing in the online environments and that the change represents a significant shift.

Neither article helped me refine my tour questions much so I am going to proceed with some further investigation & readings.

Reaction to article (10/17) and a potential tour topic

In response to the assignment to select a 'user centered' article to review as a means for selecting a tour topic, I decided to canvas current literature on Digital Library evaluation. I came across a recent article by Hong Xie titled "Evaluation of digital libraries: Criteria and problems from users' perspectives." I used this article as the basis for this discussion & through reading it formed a potential tour topic question.

Hong argues that previous evaluations of digital libraries lacked user focus and that, in this rapidly developing area, an overall lack of focus on evaluation criteria exists.

Hong points to the varying definitions of digital libraries, emphasizing two perspectives (resource/service access based and resource/service management based). She also points to the ARL definition which emphasizes links between users/objects, universal access, and diverse new formats (434). Hong continues by discussing the limitations of previous user centered studies of digital libraries, stating that previous studies "were mainly usability studies" (437). She lists a number of evaluation criteria common to both digital and traditional libraries by Saracevic (collection, information, use, standards) and expands possible evaluation criteria for digital libraries to include service evaluation, impact on communities, and evolving evaluation criteria (436). Hong asserts that the study reported in this article emphasizes user perspectives by allowing users to both define the evaluation criteria for digital libraries and then apply those criteria to the evaluation of a digital library.

The study involves an extended survey (2 years) during which 2 studies were conducted. In each case, users were asked to form evaluation criteria for a digital library, then to select a DL and evaluate it using those criteria. Her findings pointed to an emphasis on usability features (discovery, output, community) and a lack of emphasis on library based (preservation, stability, etc). Interestingly, the evaluation criteria that bubbled up from the survey put service evaluation third (behind usability & collections). Another interesting finding was an emphasis on the need to have the DL assist users with Authority judgments (449). Hong points to limitations of the study, mentioning that the participants were all LIS students who had significant backgrounds of awareness of digital libraries. She goes on to recommend evaluation of digital libraries from within the social and organizational context of the user.

In thinking about this article, I was disappointed to see little discussion of the state/type of user. Although Hong recommends further user-centric research, this article winds up focusing more on perceived importance of system functionality, not on what context drives the use of these systems. In addition, the use of LIS students most likely has a significant impact on the types of recommendations generated. Further, suggesting previously defined criteria (the ARL study) to participants prior to their definition of evaluation criteria influences their feedback.

Despite these limitations, the list of criteria presented on page 440 (grouped into major categories: Usability, Collection quality, Service quality, System performance efficiency, and User opinion solicitation) provides a high level framework within which more specific questions could be asked.

Driven in part by this article I considered a potential tour topic and came up with a few questions. What does 'user centered' mean in a digital library? Are the definitions/interests of users and perspectives different in a digital environment than in traditional environments? How could you engage in user based studies of digital libraries (how do you determine context in a digital environment)? How are information seeking theories such as SenseMaking, Anomalous States of Knowledge, Berrypicking, or Question-negotiation addressed in digital library designs?

I am not sure how/if these questions work together. Perhaps questions 2 and 3 are refinements of question 1 while 'information seeking theories'(4) is altogether separate. Given the need to limit scope of the tour topic, perhaps a more focused statement of the topic is:

In information science literature, the 'user' is evaluated using a number of different tools (surveys, interviews, ethnographies). Often these studies seek to define the context of the user in relation to a specific environment/task. The varying definitions of digital libraries (collection vs. service, resource access vs. resource organization and storage) are underwritten by differing definitions and assumed perspectives of a typical 'user.' How can the real perspectives and context of the digital library user be studied? Are there contexts/traits/actions that define a user differently in a digital environment than traditional environments?

Is this a realistic topic? Does it meet the investigative/research requirements of the assignment?