guinea pigs and digital libraries

Guinea pigs and digital libraries

I love being a guinea pig for other people’s experiments. Especially the helpful ones. I have an on-again-off-again fascination with doing personality assessments, such as the Briggs-Meyers or the Kiersey temperament sorter (by the way, I’m an ENFJ and Counselor Idealist, respectively).

(about five minutes later, I am back to writing and have just re-taken the Kiersey Temperament Sorter…)

I just finished reading two articles about studying users in the digital library by Judy Jeng, and Ferreria and Pithan. Both state that user satisfaction is key to success in searching for information, ala Carol Kuhlthau, who was innovative in her research on this topic. Satisfaction in anything a person does plays a huge role in whether or not said tasks are accomplished, with what level of success, and what toll it takes on said person. But heck, this principle should be applied to all areas of life! I shall take this research to my boss on Monday morning, along with a list of how to improve the office environment…then pack my personal items and swiftly be on my way, I suppose.

As ecstatic as I am that users feelings are just now being seriously considered for success of a product, such as a library website, databases or the like, I can’t help but think that if this kind of research is paired with psychologic endeavors, how much happier ALL of us could be, because these principals could and should be applied to the workplace, education, maybe even grocery shopping. In their article Usability of digital libraries Ferreria and Pithan recognize that the “synergy” between users’ researching and feelings “still needs other deeper studies that incorporate contributions from other areas of knowledge” (320) (see, here is the psychology, anthropology, etc part) but nonetheless, evidence is conclusive that feelings matter, especially in the digital environment.

These articles struck a warm chord with me, because I was chosen to participate in a similar study using some beta-phase geographic/local maps area of Webjunction, the website set up by the Gates Foundation for librarians to share information. I registered through the Oklahoma Department of Libraries (for job training) to take a class introducing Webjunction, and I guess they drew my name or something. Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, I love to be a “guinea pig”, so I relished in the opportunity to help with their research. According to Judy Jeng in her article What is Usability in the Context of the Digital Library and How Can It Be Measured? Some of the methods frequently used to evaluate “usability”, as it were, are “card sort, category membership expectation, focus groups, questionnaires, think-aloud…” (48) and I believe the method used in my experience was “think-aloud”.

I was assured that my performance was not being evaluated, but that of the site design, information within, etc. However, I couldn’t help but feel I had to perform well, or make the system perform well. I did not want to be the only person who couldn’t navigate the system, even though I had never met my evaluator and probably never would. Maybe that has something to do with some Freudian principle about not wanting to upset people for fear of being stuck in the latency stage of life, who knows. However, my love for academia and research prevailed, and I was able to give it the ole “college try” and be as honest as humanly possible. Mostly, I was really curious as to when that site would be available, because it seemed like it had the potential to be a really groovy reference tool. Alas, I haven’t had the time to check for it, and honestly, I had forgotten about it until reading these articles!

Something else Jeng wrote that I really dug was the differenciation of “usability” from “usefulness”, which really helped clear up some earlier confusion I had during some previous class discussions…Usability is “ease of operation”, and usefulness is “serving an intended purpose” (48), but these do work hand-in-hand and are “hard to separate in the context of evaluation,” Jeng goes on to reiterate. So if something is useful, must it also be usable? I decided to experiment with this using the online webpage for Oklahoma State University’s Library, www.library.okstate.edu. I used some of the same criteria Jeng listed at the end of her article, and it turns out that the site is quite useful, I was able to locate items in the library’s catalog, access information about the interlibrary loan services (such as, an “okey username and password” is required to really access any information) and it was useable from the networked university computer I was using at that time. I would like to take this further and find someone with a dial-up or other slow internet connection and that might be a truer test of the usability factor.

Smells like a ……………project?