A Content-Analysis Approach for Exploring Usability Problems in a Collaborative Virtual Environment

As Virtual Reality (VR) products are becoming more widely available in the consumer market, improving the usability of these devices and environments is crucial. In this paper, we are going to introduce a framework for the usability evaluation of collaborative 3D virtual environments based on a large-scale usability study of a mixedmodality collaborative VR system. We first review previous literature about important usability issues related to collaborative 3D virtual environments, supplemented with our research in which we conducted 122 interviews after participants solved a collaborative virtual reality task. Then, building on the literature review and our results, we extend previous usability frameworks. We identified twelve different usability problems, and based on the causes of the problems, we grouped them into three main categories: VR environment-, device interaction-, and task-specific problems. The framework can be used to guide the usability evaluation of collaborative VR environments

Institutional repository promotion: Current practices and opinions in Texas academia

Version of article published in New Review of Academic LibrarianshipPromoting an institutional repository (IR) to both faculty and end-users can be challenging. We surveyed academic libraries with an IR in Texas, and asked both library administrators and IR managers about their efforts to promote and grow their IR in both size and downloads. In addition, we studied the websites of Association of Research Libraries and Texas academic libraries to see how other institutions place links to their IRs on the websites and name them in different ways to draw attention. We probed and discuss findings regarding active marketing to faculty in order to grow the IR size, and passive promotion efforts such as linking on the library website, custom branding to help people find and remember the IR, and so on. We found that most marketing was geared towards faculty, and little active marketing efforts were made to the end-users.Librar