Alison Head and Michael B. Eisenberg have a new report, Lessons Learned: How College Students Seek Information in the Digital Age, http://projectinfolit.org/pdfs/PIL_Fall2009_Year1Report_12_2009.pdf.
Projectinfolit.org has produced several reports on this topic.
I’ve reshuffled a few things on the college student research behavior / information seeking-behavior project to make room for some new links. While I was at it I re-cast the information on the info-seeking home page to be more in line with the usability testing results from last summer.
In the last week of May we conducted three usability tests on the early-2009 interface. We identified problems with navigation on the pages showing results by tool (eResources, The Library, Consultations, etc.), and we discovered that the home page should be revised to make the interview results pages easier to step into.
The interface is not yet “walk-up usable,” but we got some great information about how to move it in that direction, which I hope to incorporate this summer.
New pages have been uploaded for our presentation at CIL 2009. This iteration we are using CSS for layout instead of those nasty old tables. We now have a panel-based layout that can expand with screen size, at least in Firefox, and we have a lot more control of placement, linearization, and appearance of items on the page.
While this allows a lot more layout freedom, I seem to have damaged the ability to print in IE, unfortunately, so that will be near the top of the to-do list.
The new pages are available from http://www.ponder-matic.com.
danw
The page called “Understanding student information-seeking behavior / research behavior” is the summary page and gateway page to the other pages of our prototype information-seeking behavior application.
How would you improve this page?
Prompts (optional):
Blog home page: http://blog.ponder-matic.com
The page called “The Library in student information-seeking” features any resource use related to the library, including the online catalog, the university’s gateway to licensed content, the physical library building, the reference desk, or a librarian via chat or email.
How would you improve this page?
Prompts (optional):
The page called “eResources and Everything Internet in student information-seeking” features any resource that students accessed through the Internet, including the library’s resources, Google, Wikipedia, email, IM, sites on the open web, etc.
How would you improve this page?
Prompts (optional):
The page called “Consultations in student information-seeking” features any way that students used to ask another person about their information need, including talking to their instructor, TA, or advisor; talking to a friend in school, talking to a family member, talking to an expert in the field such as an author, etc., and it includes the methods of contact, such as email, telephone, IM, etc.
How would you improve this page?
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The page called “Behavior comparisons by demographic group in student information-seeking” features the Who, When, and How of student information seeking and allows you to “drill down” into course-related and non-course-related information searching by the data set or the students’ year in school, broad academic area, school or college, or gender.
How would you improve this page?
Prompts (optional):
As you might suspect I’m new to designing with cascading stylesheets. I figured IE would be a problem and added Dreamweaver’s IE hacks to site pages. I still haven’t resolved the printing problems with IE.
However I didn’t suspect that Firefox 2 would also have problems, upon zooming in/out (ctrl plus and minus).
Another item for the development to-do list