Membership: Hill (leader); Larsgaard, Information Intermediaries group leader and content requirements; Rae, K-12/Education group leader; Simpson, Earth Sciences group leader and processing requirements; Kemp, search requirements; Carver, retrieval requirements; and Dolin, interface requirements.
Mission Statement of Team: The User Requirements subteam of the Library Team organizes and conducts sessions with various user groups to collect views and expectations of ADL content and functionality to be used to inform the near-term and long-term design of ADL from the user's perspective.
This subteam was initiated in August 1996 in response to (1) a need to target interface and system development to specific user communities and (2) a recommendation from the ADL Board meeting of June 14, 1996: "Examine and define the benefits and difficulties of approaching a multi-user interface (as opposed to an interface targeted to a specific audience)."
Two Target User Group (TUG) meetings were organized and held during the year, one on August 23, 1996 (full day; prefaced by 2-hour introductory meeting on August 12) and the second on January 13, 1997 (half day). For both meetings, there were three focus groups - Earth Sciences; Information Intermediaries; K-12. The members of these groups (a minimum of three for each TUG) were recruited from the local area so that they would be available for the meetings. They were asked to represent their user groups rather than focus exclusively on their personal environments. They had varying degrees of acquaintance with the current ADL web interface. The purpose of the sessions was not to critique the current interface but rather to find out what these users would do with a system like ADL if it were all they would like it to be.
Each TUG session began with an overview of what was to be accomplished, followed by discussions in the individual focus groups, and then by a plenary session to compare and contrast the focus groups' work. For the all-day meeting in August, each group came up with user requirements in the areas of Content, Search, Retrieval, Processing, and Interface Design and also worked on ranking and adding to scenarios that had been previously collected by Alex-UIE (Alexandria User Interface and Evaluation Team) members. Following the meeting, Alex-UIE team members categorized the requirements statements, in preparation for refining them at the second TUG meeting, where each focus group selected the requirements area of most importance to them. The second set of meetings validated many of the points made during the first TUG meeting, even though the users attending were in all but two cases different persons from those attending the first TUG meeting.
Three major results came from the TUG sessions: (1) Descriptions of the three target user groups, (2) sets of user requirements in five areas: search, retrieval, processing, content, and interface design, and (3) a model four-hour TUG session. These are described next.
Characterization of the Target User Groups
One result of the August session was that we could categorize the three Target Groups based on their differing work and task environments and their expectations from ADL. The following characterizations include the scenarios that each group selected as representing the types of information they would seek through ADL.
Earth Scientists
The Earth Scientist (ES) Group will look to ADL as a source of data for their research and development activities. They are interested in access to better technology as well as access to available data sets so that they can do better science. ES works in a high-tech environment and is interested in speed and the capability of handling large data sets. They want to perform more complex analyses and integrate disparate data sets. They want to develop models of complex systems and be able to visualize the results. ES will have very specific search criteria in terms of level of detail, source and nature of the data, and data quality. They are likely to need to obtain copies of the data set for use with their own software.
The ES Group would like for ADL to provide a working environment where they can find and manipulate spatial data sets and related georeferenced data and information that are related to particular research problems. They chose the following scenarios as best representing their activities:
), and fraction organic
carbon content of the soil and sediment.
The student is looking for region specific data,
(i.e. midwest, southwest, east coast, west coast, etc...),
and realizes this data varies greatly over any region
as large as this. The data will, however,
vary in a general sense from southwest to midwest.
The student, being told that studies such as this have been conducted,
would like to know if the library provides access
to this data.
Information Intermediaries
What sets apart the Information Intermediary (II) Group: Seeking information for others rather than for personal information needs. Therefore, IIs will see a wide range of information needs, not just specifically geared to a certain age or subject and will have to know at least a little bit about many information contexts. This group will not necessarily use the found information, but pass it on or point someone to it. This group acts as a guide, directing seekers to appropriate sources for their information needs. This group acts as a filter: digesting and understanding a user's query. In order to point, however, this group must have some rudimentary hands-on skills. Knowing how things like ADL, ftp, and Arc/Info work, helps the search and retrieval process. Knowing what can and can't be done (yet) also helps. This group does not necessarily produce a final product like the Earth Science group. This group will not necessarily walk users through the process from start to finish (finding the information, collecting it, manipulating it, producing a report) like the Education group will with their students. This group may, depending on their mission, offer training and introductory classes. This is not often done by general reference intermediaries, but by special agents like Map Librarians and GIS Information Intermediaries. This group spends more time with the information system to find and retrieve data/information and therefore can learn and use more sophisticated (complicated) functions. This group will be more likely to handle ``difficult'' search and retrieval tasks. This group will handle multiple queries in one session for different people. For example, using ADL to do a search for a student and then starting a completely new search for a faculty member.
The II group would like ADL to help them do their job of identifying and making available information resources that meet the needs of their clientele for spatial and georeferenced information.
The Information Intermediary Group chose the following scenarios as best representing their activities:
Educators
The Educators Group is interested in incorporating technology and resources into their classroom activities. They put a high value on creating environments where students have the opportunity to think critically and where they have access to powerful information resources they can use to address real-world concerns. They would like for students to be able to use resources to get data they can manipulate to generate their own "products" - charts, maps, and essays based on what they learn.
The work environment for education is significantly different from that of the other target groups. If there is a computer in the classroom it may be the only one, and very likely it does not have a fast processor or a lot of memory. Most schools still have the most of their computers in computer labs and teachers are still working out ways to develop curriculum to use them effectively. There are classrooms with several computer workstations where the curriculum is focused on collaborative learning. In such cases, teachers may want to know how ADL can be a resource for group activities. Connectivity at the T1 level is coming to public schools but is not currently present in all locations. Primarily, education is going to be interested in knowing how to teach the system itself and what it offers and then how to use ADL as a resource to teach other concepts.
The Educator Group chose the following scenarios as best representing their activities:
Design Issues, User Requirement Statements, and Scenarios
Design issue presentations were prepared for the August TUG session. These formed the first attempt by ADL staff to focus on the main design issues in search, retrieval, and processing functionality from a user's point of view. These statements and the user requirement statements and the user scenarios all provided the basis for the ADL Design Review Panel Workshop on February 19-21, 1997. The User Requirement Statements were made available for evaluation through a web forms page so that the Panel members could rate them on the frequency that they would use them. The user scenarios were distributed to the Panel members as an indication of the types of usage of ADL that had been identified.
Interface Design activities which are described elsewhere in this Annual Report.
Model TUG Session
Another outcome of the TUG activities is the creation of
a four-hour TUG session model which can
be adapted and used by other groups who are
willing to cooperate with us and collect user
information from other groups. The model can be found at:
Abstracts of Published Papers
The Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) is one of the six digital library projects funded by NSF, DARPA, and NASA. ADL's collection and services focus on geospatial information: maps, images, georeferenced data sets, georeferenced text, and other information sources with links to geographic locations. Throughout the project, user feedback has been collected through various formal and informal methods. These include online surveys, beta tester registration, the tracking of user sessions through the WWW interface, ethnographic studies of ADL users and potential users, target user group focus sessions, user feedback comments while using the interfaces, and through a formal Design Review Panel. This paper reports on three aspects of these activities. First, the evaluation methodologies and the analyses conducted on the data are described. Conclusions drawn about users and about the ADL system and interface design from these various activities are compared. Second, user requirements for ADL are profiled for three target user groups: Earth Scientists, K-12 Educators, and Information Intermediaries. The profiles include user scenarios and user 'scoring' of requirement statements in five areas: Content, Search, Retrieval, Processing, and Interface/Navigation. Finally, the evaluation and user requirement methodologies themselves are evaluated for their usefulness in informing system design decisions. This is the "so what" test from the implementation point-of-view.