2 research outputs found
Users and Uses of a Global Union Catalogue: a Mixed-Methods Study of WorldCat.org
This paper presents the first large-scale investigation of the users and uses of WorldCat.org, the world’s largest
bibliographic database and global union catalogue. Using a mixed-methods approach involving focus group
interviews with 120 participants, an online survey with 2,918 responses, and an analysis of transaction logs of
approximately 15 million sessions from WorldCat.org, the study provides a new understanding of the context
for global union catalogue use. We find that WorldCat.org is accessed by diverse population, with the three
primary user groups being librarians, students and academics. Use of the system is found to fall within three
broad types of work-task (professional, academic, and leisure), and we also present an emergent taxonomy of
search tasks which encompass known-item, unknown-item, and institutional information searches. Our results
support the notion that union catalogues are primarily used for known-item searches, although the volume of
traffic to WorldCat.org means that unknown-item searches nonetheless represent an estimated 250,000
sessions per month. Search engine referrals account for almost half of all traffic, but whilst WorldCat.org
effectively connects users referred from institutional library catalogues to other libraries holding a sought
item, users arriving from a search engine are less likely to connect to a librar
Trustworthy Transparency by Design
Individuals lack oversight over systems that process their data. This can
lead to discrimination and hidden biases that are hard to uncover. Recent data
protection legislation tries to tackle these issues, but it is inadequate. It
does not prevent data misusage while stifling sensible use cases for data. We
think the conflict between data protection and increasingly data-based systems
should be solved differently. When access to data is given, all usages should
be made transparent to the data subjects. This enables their data sovereignty,
allowing individuals to benefit from sensible data usage while addressing
potentially harmful consequences of data misusage. We contribute to this with a
technical concept and an empirical evaluation. First, we conceptualize a
transparency framework for software design, incorporating research on user
trust and experience. Second, we instantiate and empirically evaluate the
framework in a focus group study over three months, centering on the user
perspective. Our transparency framework enables developing software that
incorporates transparency in its design. The evaluation shows that it satisfies
usability and trustworthiness requirements. The provided transparency is
experienced as beneficial and participants feel empowered by it. This shows
that our framework enables Trustworthy Transparency by Design