(A report by the DLI Social Science Team)
15 November, 1995
Ann Bishop
Emily Ignacio
Laura Neumann
Robert Sandusky
Leigh Star
Since the fall of 1994, the Social Science Team has been involved in multiple data collection efforts, each aimed at learning about the yet- undefined set of potential users of the developing digital library system. As is described in this report, our methods ranged from one on one interviews with faculty to unobtrusive observation of random people in the Grainger Engineering Library. We wanted to find out who uses current library systems and how, who uses journals andhow, how different people find the iformation that they need for their work - regardless of what system (or lack theof) that they (didn’t) use. We want to know many things about our potential DLI audience, and this is reflected in the variety of questions asked.
This report is a reflection of these broad aims and is a first attempt at some synthesis of our volumes of data. It is loosely organized into two main sections, each with appendices. First we have a general collection of lists, memos and questions generated from all of our sets of data exemplifying some of the different things we can and are doing with our data. This section is complemented with some details on the methods of each data collection effort and some general descriptive statistics generated from focus groups (which you may have seen before). The second section is a more in-depth investigation of one data set.
Our goal for this preliminary report is to generate discussion and cooperation between our team and other efforts on the DLI. We would like to show the members of the broad project what our Social Science Team can do and what we have been doing. We want to generate more questions to investigate and some useful feedback loops to help the designers in their decision-making about things that would affect the (potential) users.
Happy reading!
The Social Science Team
Go to the Working Memo 1: All data to date and information finding