I am now exploring the research group site to find ideas and insights to start writing my research paper, another assignment for this subject.
What really caught my attention is user-centered approach and human categorization behavior. I plan to dig deeper into these two issues.
At the same time, I would also like to find more info on sense-making approach, claims analysis and web design heuristics. Actually I want to really know how many approaches, dimensions, etc are there to user studies.
It is also interesting to note about designing better DLs and library web sites interface that caters for thousands of users, why cannot we give options to users to change the library layout the way Blogger gave to their users?
Like for example, users can drag this link here or there, categorize those links further, and move the categorization boxes in arrangement they like.
They know the best interface that suits themselves. That way we will not be generalizing our users into broad categories. Anyway, this is just a passing thought and needs further and deeper exploration.
So many new things to me in this one web page; including information therapy in DL. What could that be? Or is it just a funny way of putting an idea about DL?
I also note that more studies or research are done in qualitative methods (either singular or complementing the quantitative method), a trend which is more common nowadays in the field of user studies.
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. She can be contacted at yooknajibah [at] yahoo.com.
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.