Archivists
- Pam Gets an email from a researcher with a specific question (let’s detail that question here based on where we will run the tests). Runs the searches (let’s detail those searches) and consolidates the results into a response to email the researcher (turn this into a test). What does she want that list of results to look like? Is she going to provide the researcher with instructions to run their own searches, as well?
- Maynard Wants to quickly search by the specific record series number for the President George Stoddard Records to locate the correspondence series within that specific record group which he vaguely remembers as being 2/10/1. (turn this into a test) Can we get more information about what this information should look like on the records?
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Academic researcher - professor
Sally Wants to access digital images in the same place as the description, without having to click forward and back. She wants to see the finding aid, have the digital object open in a new window, and easily be able to close it to click on the next item from the finding aid. What about an overlay rather than a new window, since other personas indicate that new windows are a huge negative?
I agree that new windows are a huge negative for users who have difficulty navigating the web, and think an overlay would be great functionality! (Claryn)Wants to be able to find them directly by their call number which he knows already and request to use them in the archives classroom via AEON, the archive’s request system. Does ASpace already integrate this? Or is this done through a separate system? Use USC’s work to integrate Aeon (http://www.atlas-sys.com/aeon/ and https://github.com/smoil/aeon_requests)? ASpace does not integrate this. We used the ASpace API to construct a call request that pulls the info into Aeon. (Sue)
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Alex Will be frustrated if it isn't immediately obvious whether or not materials have been digitized. If materials have been digitized, this user wants to be able to access them instantly. (make this part of the same test above) What already exists in ASpace for this? What do users typically expect to see?
Alex Would like to be able to save and share links to finding aids that are of interest. What already exists in ASpace for this? What do users typically expect to see?
Madison Has great difficulty reading anything that isn’t transcribed. Should transcriptions be available on records (or are they already)? More information on what exists or should exist would be great.
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Is not cognizant of restrictions surrounding the institution's student records and alumni files, and needs to be clearly informed of any such restrictions up-front. How is this currently handled?
At Yale, this information appears at the top of each finding aid (in the overview), and sometimes at the series level. Restrictions are generally not visible to the user at the box or folder level, so if a researcher, searching for a specific term in a finding aid, skips the overview (as they often do), they sometimes end up unwittingly requesting restricted materials, which our staff then has to manually investigate, cancel, and explain to the researcher. The latter issues can be handled adequately in Aeon, but it would be great if there were a way to make restrictions visible at the box level from the get-go. (Claryn)- Gertie Shares contextual information and research the repository can use to enhance the finding aid. How is this currently handled? How do you imagine she would share this information? With a phone call? Some kind of contextualized form? Other? I've gotten this primarily via email (but sometimes a phone call). It would've been nice if the email contained a direct link to the finding aid, but they rarely do, since our current system lacks a feedback option. I've had feedback options in other systems that were rarely used, though, so it would need to be implemented thoughtfully. All that said, this might also be a nice use case for ArchivesSpace to somehow be able to link up with an Open Annotation system... perhaps researchers could then turn on and off a feature that would allow others to see their annotations. Staff could also update finding aids based on these annotations.
- Wants to be able to add everything he is interested in using to a set, then download all the metadata into an excel spreadsheet. Is this something ASpace already does? Wants to do? ASpace doesn't exactly offer this feature, but it does have an API that some users might be interested in using (that said, the API includes a lot of information that you wouldn't want any non-staff users to see, such as "unpublished" items, and not much granularity aside from "read-only" access to everything!!!). Also, there's a lot of users that wouldn't want to use the API, but might take advantage of data exports if they were available. If there were a bookbag feature, for instance, they might want to export that information, so I think these two stories are tied together.