The final report of the UCB's study on the Use and Users of Digital Resources: A Focus on Undergraduate Education in the Humanities and Social Science by Diane Harley et all was released April 5, 2006.
This study employed several methods including surveys of faculty, focus groups, log analysis and site surveys to examine when and how unrestricted digital resources were incorporated into teaching. The study also tried to map the universe of digital resources available to undergraduates in social sciences and humanities.
Initially the investigators had hoped to limit the study to "publicly" available resources. Their focus expanded to unrestricted digital resources which was defined from the faculty member's point of view. Many faculty considered any resource available to them as unrestricted. They did not necessarily distinguish between resources licensed and paid for by the library from resources publicly available to anyone on the Internet. Digital resources includes licensed digital content, digital collections, and any digital material found on the open web.
One part of the study report shows just how complex the environment of digital resource use and users are. It's critical when engaging in research in this area to have a broad framework to understand digital information landscapes and experiences.
In order to discuss digital resources with site owners and faculty members, the investigators developed a typology of digital resources and common vocabulary of digital resources. It was soon apparent that digital resource builders used different terms than faculty, for example, the notion of collections. "Users often have a different level of granularity that categorizes their definition (e.g., whether they can find on the web a format, a photo, a picture, or a passage)." (p. 37) Photo: Valle de La Luna: By skyekat
The study team broke resources down and defined three main groupings:
1. Types of resources (images, documents, data files, maps, archived discussions, curricular materials, audio materials, simulations, ...)
2. Sources of resources (Search engines, personal collections, public, campus, departmental, and commercial image databases, online exhibits, digital library, online journals, publisher sites and other)
3. Digital resource characteristics/digital resource provider interview focus which included 25 to 30 different factors (p. 39-40)
In May 2004 the Site Owner Advisory Group critiqued the typologies and identified a need for adding resource characteristics to the typology. One of the new areas was the "a category for users' motivation for resource use". Arnold Arcolio of RLG suggested that resource characteristics are gathered around centers of value:
"Table 1.3: Digital resources and centers of value
- Content coverage (chronological, geographic, thematic, disciplinary, type of originalÂ? manuscripts, coins, maps, games)
- Form of representation (i.e., availability of digital formats and portability, e.g., jpeg, tiff, sid; proprietary or open, level of metadata: structured, standard, rich or thin; wrapper issues, e.g., HTML, XML, METS)
- Authority (e.g., source, maintenance, institutional affiliation)
-? Permitted uses and digital rights of reuse
-? Persistence (e.g., how long is the resource up, how often does updating occur?)
- Exposure for discovery (e.g., searching paths, browsing, availability for federated search, availability for Google crawling)" (p. 41)
Two major surveys of faculty were conducted by the study team to investigate the use and uses of resources. Approximately 4,500 faculty from specific departments at a stratified random sample of community colleges, University of California campuses, and liberal arts colleges in California were surveyed in mid-March 2004. A second online survey targeted instructors in the humanities and social sciences, both in the USA and internationally who subscribed to the H-Net lists and the Humanist discussion groups.
Some Noteworthy Findings
This is a rich study and anyone creating digital collections or trying to encourage the incorporaton of digital content into teaching and learning will find it beneficial to explore the report in detail. Here are a few findings that I found noteworthy:
* Images and visual materials were the most frequently used resource, and were often used for classroom presentation or posting on the web. (p. 63)
* Google-type searches were the most frequent way in which faculty found resources. (p. 64) The importance of making digitized objects findable via Internet search engines is crucial to the use of the collections.
* A faculty member's own collection of digital resources was the second most frequent source of material. (p. 64)
*Faculty, including those active and enthusiastic in their use of digital resources, identified many obstacles to using these resources for teaching. They were unsatisfied both with their ability to find the resources they need and with the tools available to manage those digital resources in different contexts. (p. 71)
*The most-cited obstacles to the effective use of digital resources were the availability, reliability, and expense of the necessary equipment in the classroom. (p. 72)
* Responses also emphasized the importance of personal digital collections in faculty work practices. It is important to emphasize that many faculty want to build their own reaggregated resources by using their own materials and then mixing them with resources they have collected along the way. (p. 9> I think this findings is one that we need to pay more attention to in the ways that we design digital sites and make content available for users to mix, map, mashup, mutate and create new creations and collections. I also think groups of researchers want to create shared specialized collections for departmental and project use.
*
Results from the analysis of both survey and TLA (log analysis) indicated that the overwhelming majority of site users on our two test sites were irregular or occasional, rather than regular, users. (p. 10) This result is also not surprising but it does have implications for how we design the site to support findability and discovery. We may have a visitor that is highly proficient and advanced user of digital resources but has no knowledge of our site. We need to design our site as if someone is seeing it for the first time - 50 first dates if you like. The suite of tools and features and content has to be revealed each time.* Response bias for site surveys is definitely a concern. While this isn't new to most of us, it's an important reminder to not view site survey respondents as "representative" of all site visitors.
The investigators tried to determine if either survey suffered from response bias. The respondents of the initial survey that was sent to approximately 4,500 faculty in higher education institutions in California seem to be representative of the whole population. "Taken together, the small demographic differences, the similarity between the groups on the sample survey questions, and the reasons given for non-response suggest that the survey respondents may be considered reasonably representative of the population in the areas of primary concern to this study. We believe that the findings based on this survey may be cautiously applied to the whole population of instructors in the targeted disciplines at these three institution types in California." (p. 54)
The researchers also explored how representative the responses to online site surveys were. Did they reflect the use of the digital resources by all site visitors or was there a bias? They found that "online site surveys suffered from response bias, and the respondents were a non-representative sample. Although the tests we conducted helped to clarify the specific techniques and metrics that provide the most useful insights into site usage, the tests also provided a vivid demonstration of some of the challenges and pitfalls in performing user research and interpreting results. Based on these results, we advise caution in generalizing from online site survey results to the whole population of site users." (p. 10)
Other Comments on the Report:
Augmentation
-= (In Between) =-
Tags: digital-libraries | digital libraries
