Designing for Information Discovery: User Needs Analysis
A. M. Conaway, Christina K. Pikas, U. E. McLean, S. D. Morris, Lisa Amanda Palmer, Lori M. Rosman, S. A. Sears, E. Uzelac, Sara E Woodson, Jhu Milton, S. Eisenhower · Johns Hopkins APL technical digest · 2010
290 that link a citation to the full text. On the other hand, locating information has become more complex when the information need is not well defined (i.e., an exploratory search1); when the search is in an interdisciplinary area; or when the need is problem-based. Our millions of electronic and print resources are fragmented across countless systems, each with an idiosyncratic search interface, widely varying coverage, and few bridges from one platform to another. We have also learned that the JHU libraries’ catalog software (both the user interface and the back end collection management database) will not be supported in the next few years. We are building a discovery tool to overlay the many disparate sources and to facilitate both retrieval of known items and exploratory search. This brief article reports on our empirical work to understand the needs of the users of the JHU libraries and the resulting tools we have built to support the design and implementation of the new discovery tool.