Digital libraries' support for the user's information journey

The temporal elements of users' information requirements are a continually confounding aspect of digital library design. No sooner have users' needs been identified and supported than they change. This paper evaluates the changing information requirements of users through their 'information journey' in two different domains (health and academia). In-depth analysis of findings from interviews, focus groups and observations of 150 users have identified three stages to this journey: information initiation, facilitation (or gathering) and interpretation. The study shows that, although digital libraries are supporting aspects of users' information facilitation, there are still requirements for them to better support users' overall information work in context. Users are poorly supported in the initiation phase, as they recognize their information needs, especially with regard to resource awareness; in this context, interactive press-alerts are discussed. Some users (especially clinicians and patients) also require support in the interpretation of information, both satisfying themselves that the information is trustworthy and understanding what it means for a particular individua

Simplified Single Source Xml Model: for Student-Centered Educational Content Management

This study investigates XML as a single source, recommending solutions and defining future needs for educators to manage student-centered educational content for diverse user preferences and multi-modal delivery. This research proposes a simplified XML single source model for educational course content management and XSL transformation of course material into multi-modal display/output that enables student-centered learning. The reviewed literature exposed four problem areas related to content management in which an XML single source might be a solution. Reviewed and synthesized literature related to XML into a cubed relationship with opposing the sides of the cube (content management/single source, corporate goals/educational goals and reuse/re-purpose) compared and contrasted. The result points to the need for a simplified XML model in order to realize the potential of educational goals for student-centered transformations (re-purposing content) and to future proof content management that is device independent and provides possible solutions to the problem areas in content management and technology management of course material

Contextual information, answerability, and the logical construction of social how-to questions

For technical-knowledge workers seeking information about how to complete software tasks, online social question and answer (SQA) sites represent a valuable resource as an emerging form of software documentation. However, because answerers on these sites respond to questions on a volunteer basis, not all questions receive answers. Current research shows that askers provide contextual information in varying amounts, yet researchers have not yet reliably described contextual information types, disagree on whether more or less information associates with answerability, and have not yet compared the coherence of answered and unanswered questions. To assist technical-knowledge workers posting questions on SQA sites, this study explores the relationship between contextual information and answerability and between logical coherence and answerability. This study analyzes 3,529 contextual-information t-units and 690 comment t-units from social how-to questions about Microsoft Word that askers posted on the popular SQA site Super User. Content analysis enabled a close examination of not only the amounts of contextual information that askers provided, but also the types of information, relationships among types, and relationships between types and answerability. Establishing and using three reliable codebooks related to social how-to questions, to contextual information, and to answerers’ follow-up comments, the study presents descriptive statistics and examples of contextual-information types and comment types. Further analyzing contextual-information types, the study presents and explores statistical differences in the distinctness, magnitude, variation, efficiency, word count, and logical coherence of contextual information in answered and unanswered questions