The course requirements that need to be fulfilled by each student in "User Needs and Behaviour" class are as shown in the boxes below:
This assignment requires the student to submit reflections from readings (backed by research, descriptive observation and literature reviews) on the relevance or importance of understanding user needs and information behavior in the context of providing information services and interface design processes to allow users to have more control over their information searching experiences.
Each student is required to prepare an organized list of sources (books, articles from journals, newspapers, magazines, theses and dissertations, conference proceedings, videos and online sources published from 2000 up
This will allow the student to explore potential sources of “user needs and behavior” and shed light on information seeking behavior and provide the research experience as she/he eventually select and develop a topic on the subject for class presentation. The bibliography should be organized alphabetically by author’s last name. This includes careful recording of the bibliographic details to ensure correct referencing.
Students are required to present / report designed to brief dimensions of information seeking behavior; understanding the needs and habits of different user groups; use of information to achieve their goals.
Develop / design a project plan integrating user needs and information seeking behavior into the designs of a library service more in tune with their needs.
Each student is required to create/design and maintain a website. The choice is left to the student where to mount the web site as long as it is publicly accessible to other students of the course and the instructor. This will serve as a venue for every student to submit one’s assignment; will be presented and evaluated by other members of the class.
Check the Postgraduate Exam Timetable at the faculty web site before examination week.
The author of this web site is a final semester MLIS student at the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. She is currently in charge of a one-man-library in a marine consulting company in Petaling Jaya. Previously she worked as an assistant librarian at a National Library of Malaysia village library in her hometown, Machang, Kelantan.
Technology is so much fun, but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
Daniel J. Boorstin - American social historian and educator, 1914.
Apart from information retrieval there is virtually no other area of information science that has occasioned as much research effort and writing as "user studies".
Tom Wilson, 1981.
In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret’s nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.
Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973), U.S. biographer.