Mark Notess

Variations2: retrieving and using music in an academic setting

University music students, teachers, and researchers discover and retrieve musical works and navigate within them, then create annotations and share them with other users.

Designing effective tasks for digital library user tests: lessons learned

Purpose – To describe lessons learned about the process of designing effective tasks for digital library user tests.Design/methodology/approach – Illustrated examples are drawn from eight separate user tests run over the course of three years during development of Variations2, the Indiana University digital music library.Findings – Four major considerations for effective task design are described and illustrated. Areas explored include iterative task development, design of authentic activities, recruitment of authentic users and how to deal with unrealistic testing scenarios.Practical implications – Lessons learned in task design are matched with examples that illustrate how to balance real‐world constraints with ideal testing conditions to gather useful results.Originality/value – User tests that consider a balance between real‐world constraints and ideal conditions are more apt to provide useful design ideas for complex systems such as digital libraries. Practitioners may use these guidelines to develop...

Predicting user satisfaction from subject satisfaction

In this paper, we describe work-in-progress in comparing user satisfaction ratings after user tests with ratings obtained following actual use of a digital music library software. We identify some of the variables that hamper prediction, and we reflect on the utility of surveys for predicting user/subject gaps in satisfaction.

Variations2: improving music findability in a digital library through work-centric metadata

Summary form only given. The Variations2 Indiana University Digital Music Library is a large test-bed project funded in part by Phase 2 of the Digital Libraries Initiative, with support from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. This demonstration shows the current state of the Variations2 test-bed software, focusing on the search user interface. Libraries of digitized multimedia content provide access to virtual entities. In the case of music, where there may be many performances and arrangements of a given work, newer metadata models that are less item-centric or book-centric promise superior search capabilities for digital library users. The Variations2 metadata model is one such model. Like the functional requirements for bibliographic records (FRBR) from the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) our model is work-centric. Moreover, we have implemented a digital music library system based on that metadata model. One benefit of the Variations2 search user interface is the use of music-specific search fields such as key or performer. A second benefit is the ability to navigate directly to the desired work within a multiwork item. A third benefit is the introduction of stepwise disambiguation of the users search criteria. The disambiguation process varies depending both on what fields the user fills in and the actual content of the digital library. Thus our implementation demonstrates some of the benefits of a work-centric, music-specific metadata model.