User Needs Assesment

Photo Diary Study

Overview: proposal and notes

(This is part 1 of a set of assessment projects to be conducted during the spring semester of 2006. Part 2 = group task analysis, part 3 = interviews).

Studying students in their own environment
 How do they find and use information related to their academic work at MIT?

Rationale:
It's better to study people in their own environment.  A "cultural probe" is an object you give people to jog their memory. It is part of the person's environment and assists their memory of certain events.  Since we can't follow people around, we ask them to record events for us.  An example is a camera.  You make a list of things you want them to document.  Then they take photos of those things.  Afterwards you interview them to learn their story. They bring the photos and notes to the interview to jog their memories.

When a team discusses the results, this type of data/input brings a lot of potential to generate thinking in a different and creative way about information needs. It allows us to see the full breadth of information seeking tasks in which they engage and we can see the context of people's information seeking behavior and where the gaps might be that we could fill.

 

What we hope to learn:
- What are their tasks?
- What are the various learning and information-seeking modes used by students?
- How do they break into categories? Does it vary by discipline?
- What is the larger context for how people seek information and how do various tasks interrelate?

 

Plan:
- Recruit about 20 graduate students and 20 undergraduate students.
- Ask them to document their information seeking tasks for a period of 1 week. They will do this by taking photographs and notes about what they did.
- They are to bring the photos and notes to a 1.5 hour interview session with us.
- We will offer a $50 Amazon.com gift certificate for their time.
- We will get appropriate permissions from MIT's COUHES - Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects.
- We will ask for permission from volunteers to use their photos and comments anonymously in our analysis and publications and presentations about this study.

 

Timing:
- graduate students during IAP
- undergrads beginning in late February (after their classes have started)
- have volunteers document their tasks for 1 week, and come to a scheduled interview sometime during the 2-3 weeks following
- week 4, we begin to analyze the results

 

Getting people to volunteer:
We'd like to get balanced groups of people from different departments:

20 grad students - suggested # of volunteers:

- School of Engineering (2700 students) - 8 volunteers
- Sloan (1000 students) - 4 volunteers
- School of Science (1000) students - 4 volunteers
- School of Architecture, Art, Urban Planning  (600 students) -    2 volunteers
- School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences  (350 students) -  2 volunteers

20 undergrad students (wait until February)
- engineering (1600 students)-  8 volunteers
- science (900 students)-   5 volunteers
- Sloan (275 students) -  4 volunteers
- shass (150 students) -   2 volunteers
- architecture (50 students) -   1 volunteers

recruiting:
- contact people who said they would be willing to help from the big library survey
- grad student council (we have a contact there)
- undergrads through Housemasters (Nina & her colleagues)

 

MIT Libraries staff involvement:
8 of our staff members (4 teams of 2)
Each team of 2 people does 5 interviews  = 20 interviews
(one person interviews, one person takes notes)
Repeat this process again in February with undergrads instead of grads.

Members of Web Advisory Group + SFX/Verde user needs subgroup + 2 additional librarians:
Tracy Gabridge
Millicent Gaskell
Nicole Hennig
Stephen Skuce
Christine Quirion
Darcy Duke
librarian one: Maggie Bartley
librarian two: Amy Stout

Budget:
part one: (January and February 2006)
- $50 gift certificate (Amazon.com)
- 40 people = $2,400 (40 people is $2000 - room for a few extra responses)

part two and three: (later in the semester)
- money for interviews (20 people) and for group task analysis (36 people), 2-hour task for each: $25
56 people x $25 = $1400

- total budget: $3,800 (Nina has approved this amount from her budget)

 

Ideas for questions:

[Explain our goals to each volunteer and what this study will help us learn.]

We are interested in finding out how you seek and use information related to your academic and research life. During the next week we'd like you to take pictures or notes when you engage in any of the following activities.

Bring the photos (either printed, on a disk, or at a web site we can access) and notes to a 1.5 hour interview to help tell the story of what you recorded for us.

Ideas for what to photograph/record: (draft)

- where are you when you look for information?
dorm room, library, cafe, student center
- what are you doing?
web searching, using library catalogs or databases, asking for advice from peers/professors, reading, listening to radio/podcasts, browsing in a bookstore or the library, lab work, experiments,  conversations, studying

- why are you searching or using the information?

- what resources are you using?
web, books, journals, friends, library databases, e-journals, newspapers

- what are you searching for?

- in what order do you go about a task?
- what strategies do you use?
- when are you doing these things?
day of week, time of day, time of year
- what devices do you use?
computer, iPod, PDA, cell phone, other

 

Ideas for what we will ask during the interviews: (draft)

- what worked well for you?
- what problems did you run into?
- is there a typical task that you didn't do this week that you would normally do?
- what other MIT resources are you using?
- what is your home page?
- what MIT sites do you visit on a daily basis?

Demographic/informational questions:
- what department are you in?
- how long have you been at MIT?
- rate how often you use the MIT Libraries, online and physically
- characterize your learning style (visual, auditory, kinesthetic ? or something)
- A question on programming savvy, familiarity with web 2.0 concepts

 

Web site created on February 6, 2006 - Nicole Hennig