Presentation given at the NFAIS Humanities Roundtable XII for the panel “Is It Marketing to Users, Instruction for Users or Interfering with Users?: Engaging Students, Scholars and Faculty Members”

1. Harriett Green
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
NFAIS Humanities Roundtable XII
September 30, 2013

2. 
“While a greater reliance and dependency on digital
resources is inevitable, the quality of the data and their
organization and accessibility in service to teaching and
scholarship are major concerns.
“Without the guiding voice of scholars, the tremendous
effort now being devoted to digitizing our cultural
heritage could in fact impede, not facilitate, future
research.”
—Charles Henry, The Idea of Order: Transforming
Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship
Why Users?

3. 
Scholarly primitives
(Unsworth 2000):
 Discovering
 Annotating
 Comparing
 Referring
 Sampling
 Illustrating
 Representing
What Are They Doing?
Scholarly information
activities (Palmer, Neumann,
Pirmann 2009):
 Searching
 Collecting
 Reading
 Writing
 Collaborating
 Data Practices

4. 
 Study published in Website Analytics for Information
Professionals: A LITA Guide
 Analytics data from Google Analytics and StatCounter for
three websites
 Who are the library’s users?
 How well do they navigate the website’s architecture to find
resources?
 What information needs do their searching and browsing
behavior express?
 Findings:
 Website usage reflective of humanities research practices:
non-linear, wide-ranging, hybrid resources
 Address user needs for specialized content
Humanities Web Portal

5. 
What:
 Survey of faculty on usage of literature journals collection
Needs:
 Access to a broad scope of the scholarly literature
 Have a easily accessible conduit for scholarly
communications and currency
 Tool for graduate training
 Content-rich for interdisciplinary use
Results:
 Literatures and Languages Journals database
 Future: RSS feed aggregators like TicTOC
Journals User Study

6. 
 MONK = Metadata Opens New Knowledge
 Study published in LLC: Web analytics data and
interviews
Needs:
 Collocation of information resources and tools
 Flexibility in access to resources and tools
 User friendliness in structure of resource
MONK User Study

7. 
 Adaptability
 Manipulability
What Are Users Seeking?

8. 
“Reading will be immersive, not in the sense that we think
of now, where the seamless virtual skin of a rendered
environment creates an illusion of wholeness where only
fragmentary knowledge exists, but the opposite, a faceted,
fragmented world of associated bits, pieces, parts, whose
kaleidoscopic reorganization follows a productive tension
between lines of composition and interpretation, authorship
and re-authorship through the performative acts of reading
and viewing.”
—Johanna Drucker, “Scholarly Publishing: Micro Units and
the Macro Scale”
Future modes of
information interaction

9. 
Harriett Green
English and Digital Humanities Librarian
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
green19@illinois.edu | @greenharr
Handout:
https://uofi.box.com/nfaisgreen
Thank you!