The following personas seem to group together under the category of "graduate student" – please consolidate into one or two personas with very specific stories.
Susan Pyzynski (Unlicensed) has taken responsibility for consolidating and refining these personas by .
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.
- Works full time, has a family, online student.
- 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/collate individual records from multiple searches to view together at the end of the search process.
- Would like to search multiple repositories through one search.
Special Collections Personas (added by Susan)
Jane Doe is a graduate student in art history from the University of Washington. This is the first year of her dissertation research, and she has only done one other small archival project. She found a collection at Harvard through a finding aid that came up in a Google search.
- 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.
- 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?
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.