I started my Thursday afternoon with Exploring the User Experience with Digital Primary Source. Sherri Berger, Rachel Hi, Jody DeRidder, Donghee Sinn and Roger Schonfield spoke about their different user research projects.
Across their presentations was the common theme that researchers want more- more digital content. While this may not surprise us, it seems that after talking to Historians, as Roger did for the Ithaka report, that not only are researchers seeking digital content, they also struggle to manage their content. Rachel’s research shows that researchers aren’t interested in creating personal accounts with the California Digital Library because it would then be one more account password to remember.
Sherri’s user research shows that a growing number of undergrads, grads and faculty are using the CDL’s content, even though one of their main sites is geared towards a k-12 audience. These non k-12 professional scholars are toggling between many different sites to collect and manage their content. Jody shared that the researchers she observed are copying and pasting massive amounts of content into a single Word doc to take advantage of the search functionality. Surely, we as archivists, who manage all kinds of data should be working with our researchers to help them in this endeavor!
Roger posed three questions that I found compelling:
1. How can archivists provide Google books level access and description (specifically with regards to search functionality)?
2. Can services be organized around finding everything versus finding something (aka the Google effect)?
3. How can we build tools to empower scholars to turn sources into narrative and new scholarship?
I’d love to hear your answers and ideas in response to these questions!