Questions from reviewing initial personas

Owned by Rain Michaels (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Aug 13, 2015 by Mark Custer
7 min read

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?

 

Librarian or Curator/Special Collections researcher

  • Anne When scrolling through inventories would like a horizontal ribbon that carries the relevant hierarchy information (for example series, sub-series). Need more information about this. Examples? What does this look like?  

    NYPL's site provides a good example of this, since the series title information is pinned to the top via one of those javascript scrollspy features. Note also that they can preview the scope and contents notes of the series-level notes.  http://archives.nypl.org/mss/979#detailed  (it's better to see in action, rather than taking a screenshot...  just scroll down a while, and note the "i" icon pop up  next to the right of the series title.


 

Doing their job researcher

  • Aimee This is someone who occasionally looks for something they need to support something else they are doing (e.g. a cool photo to post to social media, or a quote to support a speech. These uses are not in ASpace often and need to be fast when they are). How does Aimee want to see search results returned to her when looking for something to post to social media? If her search returns 100 results, how many of those will she actually look at? How will she quickly get the item she needs?  Aimee might find it more useful in ArchivesSpace to browse and search through the digital objects module.

  • Nick Needs to be able to "save" or favorite archival objects, collections, and digital objects in a shopping cart or bookmarks for later viewing. Does he have some kind of account?
    ASpace does not have user account functionality, so no.  This would be a great feature to add. (Sue)  Agreed!  I've often thought it would be helpful if researchers could essentially create their own finding aids before repository visits.  Rather than just sending bulk requests via Aeon before or during a visit, it would probably be helpful for them to pull together correspondence series, for instance, from multiple finding aids into a a single place that they can continue to consult even after they've handled the material physically in the reading room (and, of course, if they could attach their digital photographs to that new finding aid of theirs to organize their images, that might prove really useful to them, and even the repository, if that information could find its way back to the public interface that everyone uses).  That said, accounts create a whole host of other complications.  One example of not needing an account to create a permanent bookbag is here, via the "my list" feature:  http://collections.si.edu/search/ 

  • Ryan Wants to be able to pay fees online. Is this something that can already be done through ASpace? This brings up a LOT of considerations. What already exists? What do institutions do now?
    Yale does not currently support online payments, but would very much like to, and is hoping to begin doing so using the functionality in Aeon (which already has the user accounts, history, and agreements necessary for such an endeavor) in the coming year. (Claryn)

Professional researcher

  • Stephan is an engineer researcher looking for the cost estimates used on an Air Force project from the 1970s. What does this workflow look like? How does he expect to see the results in ASpace? What will he do next once he gets those results?

    Unless the material has been digitized, Stephan most likely won't see what he's looking for in ASpace.  Instead, he would hope to get a good idea about where these materials might be in a collection (or multiple collections).  If he can narrow down (by looking at the finding aid in ASpace and talking with reference staff) that the cost esitmates might be somewhere in boxes 5-10 in a collection, the next step would be to request those materials to the reading room. (someone else will need to chime in if they have an actual example finding aid that goes along with this use case, but I think that would really help illustrate the process / difficulty;  my guess is that Stephen would probably start searching for any references to that air force project in ArchivesSpace).

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)

 

Academic researcher - graduate student

  • Julian would appreciate anything that will make creating citations easier. What would make this possible? Displaying citation information, already correctly formatted, on the record? What can he currently get vs. what would be most useful to him?
    I'm biased toward the variety of citation tools JSTOR provides, as researchers writing in different disciplines will have different needs. (Claryn)

  • Julian 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. What would help satisfy this curiosity that makes sense and is easy to maintain in ASpace? What already exists? There are significant privacy concerns with this sort of request that would need further discussion.

  • Janet Wants to be able to annotate/tag results for her own use. Is this functionality already in ASpace? Should it be? Phase II?

  • Janet Needs permanent links to descriptive metadata. Does this already exist in ASpace? Should it be written on the screen (perhaps in the style of Youtube or Instagram share tools)?

  • Janet Needs permanent links to online resources. Does this already exist in ASpace? Should it be written on the screen (perhaps in the style of Youtube or Instagram share tools)?

Academic researcher - undergraduate student

  • 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.

Hobbyist / personal interest researcher

  • 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.