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Site Visit and Quarterly Reports send comments or questions to: l-neuma1@uiuc.edu |
1996
November to December, 1996We all spent more time on finishing up usability tests on the three interfaces and writing and presenting reports for these. In addition, Bob Sandusky has worked with the Testbed Team to add a comment button to the custom client. The comment button is intended to capture specific suggestions and reactions that arise at any point during use sessions. Bob has also been working on making monthly compilations of basic statistics of use of the testbed. Initial analysis of usability logs indicated it was necessary to shorten the registration form, and Bob began working on building a new, more streamlined form. Laura has been planning another ethnographic study with a new group of potential users, as the study planned for the fall was swallowed up by work in interface testing. We have all been working on presentations and publications: July to October 1996In the end of the summer, our team experienced some personell changes. Cece Merkel was hired at 10 or so hours a week. Emily Ignacio began teaching for the Sociology department and thus reduced her hours. Emma Bishop became an honorary member of our team. The major things undertaken this semester were work on the registration and transaction logging systems, hosting the 1996 Allerton Institute, and usability testing all available interfaces. See below for details and additional work. Robert Sandusky, in cooperation with the Testbed Team and Grainger librarians, implemented the registration / transaction logging systems in August. The Social Science Team began providing monthly Testbed usage reports in September. Minor enhancements to these systems were made throughout the quarter. The Social Science Team, especially Emily Ignacio and Ann Bishop, played a key role in organizing and conducting the NSF-sponsored Allerton Institute, held on Oct. 27-29, 1996. The Institute, called "Libraries, People, and Change: A Research Forum on Digital Libraries," was attended by over 50 researchers and practitioners. The Institute included workshops on sense-making theory, studying the use of digital documents, and designing DL evaluations. Sessions were held on classifying digital materials, supporting DL users, and management issues. We have spent a lot of time doing usability tests of various interfaces from the project. Laura Neumann, Cece Merkel, Emily Ignacio and Bob Sandusky cooperated in testing three interfaces. Reports on each are forth coming Laura Neumann began setting up a follow up study to her work with the physicists last spring. Interviews were started and observations were planned. Leigh Star obtained a grant for a project related to our work on the Social Science Team. She is investigating the organization of work space with another team. Laura Neumann is affiliated with this project. Members of our team have been doing presentations as well: June to July 1996Leigh Star gave a workshop presentation: "Ubiquitous classification, documents and institutional memory", Workshop on Material Infrastructure for Institutional Memory, Institute for Research on Learning, Menlo Park, CA, June, 1996. Leigh Star gave a talk at Ricoh Corporation Research Center, Menlo Park, CA, June 1996, on classification and documents. Ann Bishop and Leigh Star are finishing up a chapter for the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, called (tentatively!): Social Informatics for Digital Libraries. The chapter describes the emerging community of researchers who are interested in the social interactions and relationships among people involved in creating, supporting, and using DLs; the social construction of DLs; DLs as a social movement; organizational adoption and use of DLs; and the fit between DLs and people's work and leisure activities. Emily Ignacio has been working with Frances Jacobson on a paper to appear in _Library Trends_ (tentatively) titled "Exploring how Learners Articulate Information Seeking: Implications for Digital Library Environments". In addition, she has been attending a survey workshop to help her prepare the surveys that will be mailed (or e-mailed) to users and potential users. She is also helping Ann Bishop coordinate the Allerton Conference on user methods that will be held on October 27-29. Laura Neumann has been working on data analysis, finishing the study of the physicists, and working on finding a new site in which to study work place practices and information finding. Bob Sandusky has been working further on making the user registration form work with the testbed and collect data. In addition, he has also been making the system that will log user actions in the testbed actually work and collect data. March to May 1996Ongoing work for May and beyond includes integrating our registration form into the testbed, doing further usability tests on the ever- changing testbed, and continuing research with physicists at Beckman. In addition, in May there will be a publishers workshop during which we will give presentations, and an all DLI workshop in Michigan where we will be involved in meetings and presentations. We are also trying to map out our summer work. For a site visit in mid-March several summaries of our work over the past year were prepared by all the team members, with special emphasis on the most recent efforts (testbed evaluation and work with Beckman physicists.) These are: Laura Neumann began observing physicists in Beckman as they work. We are hoping to learn more about their workflows and how they find and use information. Ann Bishop gave a presentation called "Engineers and Scientists on the Net" as part of the Manufacturing 2002 Lecture Series offered by the School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. The presentation described trends in digital libraries and other information technologies and discussed their implications for engineering education and manufacturing work. At ACM's Digital Libraries '96, Ann Bishop helped organize a day-long workshop on methods for conducting digital library user research. She also participated in the D-LIB Panel on social aspects of digital libraries. Leigh Star lead a workshop entitled "User Needs Assessment: Ethnography," ACM Conference on Digital Libraries, Bethesda, Maryland, March 1996. She also gave a keynote address entitled "To Classify is Human," at ACM Hypertext '96, Bethesda, March 1996. January to February 1996Emily Ignacio took the lead in setting up and carrying out usability tests on the first prototype of the digital library testbed. A report was generated and given to the testbed team. Laura Neumann conducted interviews with physicists at Beckman about their work, information finding habits, and computer use. Bob Sandusky finished preparing the user registration form for its first test and asked people to register. He also has been working with the testbed team to get the user registration form connected to the prototype testbed and to instrument the prototype. Leigh Star attended workshop, "Social Contexts of Digital Libraries," Sponsored by NSF and UCLA Grad School of Lib and Info science, February, at UCLA. Leigh Star presented "Problems of Learning and Communication in Establishing an Information System for Scientists." Education Policy Studies Colloquium, College of Education, University of Illinois, February, 1996.
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