Persona: Academic researcher -- graduate student

Owned by Rain Michaels (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Aug 12, 2015 by Susan Pyzynski (Unlicensed)
3 min read

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


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 result sets from multiple searches, 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). 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?
  • 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?
  • Is confused why searching is limited to within one collection, when limiting searches.