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Academic Library Personas
Graduate Student
- Background:
- Name: Julian
- Age: 27
- Location: New York City
- Year: 4th year graduate student (typically spent teaching, researching, and writing his dissertation)
- Major: American Studies, interests include History of American Music, 20th Century Cultural & Intellectual History, Material Culture, Public Humanities
- Technology: MacBook Air, Android phone
- Use case:
- Julian is only on campus three days a week. These are the days that he teaches and holds office hours. The rest of the week, he is based in the city. Because he is only at Yale for a few days a week, he games the library online systems in order to maximize his time on campus. He checks carefully to see what he can view online and what he needs to use on site. Currently, Julian is preparing an article on representations of musicians in the popular press. At this point he is not focused on any particular musician but wants to look at newspaper clippings, posters, caricatures, and photographs for major 20th century musicians. Overall, Julian hopes to tie this work into his dissertation, focusing on Copland and his network.
- Would appreciate anything that will make creating citations easier.
- Is curious about which of Yale's collections other researchers in his field have found useful, and whether other researchers have published material on Copland using sources held by Yale.
Academic Library/Special Collections Personas (added by Matt).
Malik, graduate student, 32 years old.
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Malik, 30 years old, is a 4th-year graduate student in American history at Stanford working on his dissertation and as a teaching assistant. He is an experienced archival user who consults and makes use of archivists and librarians at his institution. He is a savvy with using both social media and such tools as citation and annotation tools. He is only on campus a few days a week and looks for ways of utilizing his time efficiently and effectively.
- Wants robust advanced/faceted searching to narrow search results.
- Wants easy access to digitized versions of material, and want to be able to make digitization requests through the public interface.
- Wants to be able to save and sort/collate individual records result sets from multiple searches to view together at the end of the search process, including locations and identifiers for each resource into one merged set of results.
- Would like to search multiple repositories through one search, regardless of format (manuscript, print, image).
Special Collections Personas (added by Susan)
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- Needs to be able to limit searches by broad date spans. Needs to be able to limit searches by broad date spans.
- Is interested in finding online resources where available.
- Wants to be able to annotate/tag results for her own use.
- Needs permanent links to descriptive metadata.
- Needs permanent links to online resources.
- Is interested in finding online resources where available
- Wants to be able to integrate results in citation management software (such as RefWorks, Zotero)
- Wants to export finding aid information, both the full finding aid, and only selected items.
- Is curious about which of Stanford's collections other researchers in his field have found useful, and whether other researchers have published material on his dissertation topic using sources held by Stanford.
Jane, 23 years old, is a 1st-year graduate student in art at Harvard. She is an inexperienced archival user who always starts her research with a Google search. She occasionally finds references to archival collections this way that she thinks might be helpful to her research, but doesn’t understand how to navigate her way to finding the actual material.
- Wants to use an online collections database to search across the archives and manuscript and publications in the Archives and Special collections.
- Wants to know how to get in touch with the repository to ask questions about material availability, visiting policies, etc.
- Wants to set up an appointment with a librarian or archivist to talk about her project.
- Is not familiar with the area and wonders how to get to the repository. Is it close to public transit?
- Wonders if there is other similar material at Harvard. Can she easily figure out a way to search Harvard’s archival holdings from the finding aid page she found?
- Uses Zotero and wants to save any relevant collections she finds into her Zotero Library.
- Is excited about the material she found and wants to be able to e-mail the finding aid directly to her academic advisor.
- Wants to request material from the collection for use in the reading room
- Would like to have the Box / Folder information exportable for emailing to the Reference staff for retrieval.
- Is also interested in newsletters, zines, and other printed material. She knows that this type of material might not have a finding aid. How can she find out if the repository has published material?
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Janet Doe, a graduate student in history at Stanford University, is doing research on material culture in early New England. She is relatively experienced in archival research, and makes it a point to talk with archivists about her project as part of her discovery plan. She uses social media to share highlights of her research visits.
- Wants to find relevant sources, regardless of format (manuscript, print, image) across all repositories at Harvard.
- Needs easily accessible contact and policy information about each repository, including how to plan a visit and how to request materials for use in the repository’s reading room.
- Needs to be able to limit searches by broad date spans.
- Is interested in finding online resources where available.
- Wants to be able to save and sort result sets, including locations and identifiers for each resource.
- Wants to be able to annotate/tag results for her own use.
- Wants to be able to integrate results in citation management software (such as RefWorks, Zotero)
- Needs permanent links to descriptive metadata.
- Needs permanent links to online resources.
Sally Smith, 35, is a research assistant who has been working with the same author for several years and does the initial collection screening for her academic partner. (Provided by Kari S.)
- Wants to use an online collections database to search across the archives and manuscript and publications in the Archives and Special collections.
- Wants to export finding aid information
- Is frustrated that she can't export only the relevant portions from the collection description that she wants - only info from Series 5 but not the full 100pg finding aid.
- Would like to have the Box / Folder information exportable for emailing to the Reference staff for retreival.
- Is confused why searching is limited to within one collection, when limiting searches.