Karen Markey

Perceptions and Experiences of Staff in the Planning and Implementation of Institutional Repositories

The MIRACLE (Making Institutional Repositories a Collaborative Learning Environment) Project team investigated issues and trends related to institutional repository planning and implementation, such as the purposes and roles of an institutional repository (IR), system selection criteria, system features, policies, services, and sustainability. Data were collected through telephone interviews with thirty-six IR staff and individuals who played important roles in the development of IRs at their respective institutions. Interviewees came not only from academic institutions where an IR had been implemented but also from those planning, pilot-testing, or having no plans to launch an IR. Regardless of the phase of IR development, interviewees consistently expressed enthusiasm for deploying IRs to provide access to and to preserve digital materials. The findings indicate that IR staff view the IR as the infrastructure for their university’s participation in the open access movement and are confident about IR’s long-term sustainability. Because branding and the scope of IRs have evolved over the years, IRs are increasingly being perceived in terms of this overarching goal or purpose, rather than as a set of specific functions, features, or services. Based on these results, it is suggested that IRs need to design value-added service models that would allow IR staff to better serve their learning communities.

Amount of invested mental effort (AIME) in online searching

This research investigates how peoples perceptions of information retrieval (IR) systems, their perceptions of search tasks, and their perceptions of self-efficacy influence the amount of invested mental effort (AIME) they put into using two different IR systems: a Web search engine and a library system. It also explores the impact of mental effort on an end users search experience. To assess AIME in online searching, two experiments were conducted using these methods: Experiment 1 relied on self-reports and Experiment 2 employed the dual-task technique. In both experiments, data were collected through search transaction logs, a pre-search background questionnaire, a post-search questionnaire and an interview. Important findings are these: (1) subjects invested greater mental effort searching a library system than searching the Web; (2) subjects put little effort into Web searching because of their high sense of self-efficacy in their searching ability and their perception of the easiness of the Web; (3) subjects did not recognize that putting mental effort into searching was something needed to improve the search results; and (4) data collected from multiple sources proved to be effective for assessing mental effort in online searching.

Institutional Repositories: The Experience of Master's and Baccalaureate Institutions

In 2006, MIRACLE Project investigators censused library directors at all U.S. academic institutions about their activities planning, pilot testing, and implementing the institutional repositories on their campuses. Out of 446 respondents, 289 (64.8 percent) were from masters and baccalaureate institutions (M&BIs) where few operational institutional repositories (IRs) were in place but where interest in learning more about the M&BI experience pertaining to IRs was high. Comments by these library directors in the MIRACLE study demonstrated their desire to learn more about IR planning and implementation at institutions like their own. We address their comments in this paper, which compares IR activities at M&BIs to research universities (RUs).

The Effectiveness of a Web-based Board Game for Teaching Undergraduate Students Information Literacy Concepts and Skills

I also decided to categorize the articles according to what they are about. The following list shows the categories I decided on. If the article discusses more than one of these topics the most prominent topic goes first with the other following after a period. For example, if the article was mostly about Digital Resources but also discussed Music faculty and Google.com its number would be 2.34. After the number I included the first two letters of author’s last name and last two letters of the year the article was published.

Conceptualizing institutional repositories: using co-discovery to uncover mental models

This study investigates how people construct mental models of new information systems with which they have limited experience. Six different institutional repositories were used as the experimental systems for this lab-based co-discovery experimental study. Sixty subjects (30 pairs) were asked to complete search tasks based on a simulated work situations using an institutional repository. Subsequently, subjects were instructed to visually depict how they thought the institutional repository worked and then explain this to their partner. Our findings are based on these drawings, descriptors written on drawings, and audio-recordings of explanations and conversations. The results reveal that most of the subjects constructed mental models focusing on system operations and the design of the user interface. Few highlighted the interactivity between the system and the end user or presented a global-view of the system to show how it related to other search engines or databases. We found that the co-discovery method provides a viable research design to elicit peoples mental model construction. The implications of the results for interactive information retrieval community and institutional repository community are discussed in terms of research design, search behavior, and user instruction.

Designing and testing a web‐based board game for teaching information literacy skills and concepts

Purpose – This paper seeks to focus on the design and testing of a web‐based online board game for teaching undergraduate students information literacy skills and concepts.Design/methodology/approach – Project team members with expertise in game play, creative writing, programming, library research, graphic design and information seeking developed a web‐based board game in which students used digital library resources to answer substantive questions on a scholarly topic. The project team hosted game play in a class of 75 undergraduate students. The instructor offered an extra‐credit incentive to boost participation resulting in 49 students on 13 teams playing the game. Post‐game focus group interviews revealed problematic features and redesign priorities.Findings – A total of six teams were successful meeting the criteria for the instructors grade incentive achieving a 53.1 percent accuracy rate on their answers to substantive questions about the black death; 35.7 percent was the accuracy rate for the se...

Forty Years of Classification Online: Final Chapter or Future Unlimited?

SUMMARY This paper examines the forty-year history of online use of classification systems. Enhancing subject access was the rationale for obtaining support to conduct research in classification online and for incorporating classification into online systems. Catalogers have been the beneficiaries of most of the advances in classification online and operational online systems are now able to assist them in class number assignment and shelflisting. To this day, the only way in which most end users experience classification online is through their online catalogs shelflist browsing capability. The author speculates on the reasons why classification online never caught on as an end users tool in online systems. Both the information industry and the library and information science community missed the opportunity to lead the charge in the organization of Internet resources; however, OCLC, the publisher of the Dewey Decimal Classification, has made substantial improvements to the scheme that have increased its versatility for organizing Internet resources. Because mass digitization projects such as Google Print will solve the problem of subject access, the author makes recommendations for classification online to solve these vexing problems of end users: staging of access, retrieving the best material in response to user queries, and automatic approaches to finding additional relevant information for an ongoing search.

The Benefits of Integrating an Information Literacy Skills Game into Academic Coursework: A Preliminary Evaluation

This article describes a new tool for teaching information literacy skills to college undergraduates. BiblioBouts is a game built on premises of educational gaming that came out of research published in the October 2008 issue of D-Lib Magazine. BiblioBouts seeks to satisfy student requests for a gaming experience directly integrated into their current coursework. Alpha testing of the game focuses on answering three main questions: Is BiblioBouts an effective approach for teaching undergraduate students information literacy skills? Do students want to play this game? What improvements does BiblioBouts need? Student response has been encouraging on all fronts. Contact information is provided so that interested parties can learn more.

The effect of scoring and feedback mechanisms in an online educational game

A research and development (R&D) team designed and developed the BiblioBouts online information literacy game to give undergraduate students opportunities to learn and practice information literacy skills using online library research tools and scholarly databases while they work on a research-and-writing assignment. To evaluate the alpha version of BiblioBouts, the R&D team analyzed game-play logs from two undergraduate classes and invited students who played the game in class to participate in focus group interviews. The resulting insights into the impact of scoring and game feedback on student game play were used to help instructors plan for game play in their classes and to help the R&D team improve BiblioBouts. These results also spawned game premises to guide the R&D team and other designers of educational games build better games.