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Re: On-line access to archives/archival collections



Thanks for continuing the thread Maureen Dolyniuk.

        >I think that archival web sites should strive to have content that
provides
        >something for everyone, even though their main focus may be serving
the
        >needs of their own clientele (researchers).
I totally agree. People will come to your website with specific information
needs, whether it be learning about your collections, what hours you are
open,
the history of HBC, how to contact a specific staff member, etc etc. I think
strong
website design includes a home page which immediately directs users to
specific
information they require.

        >Perhaps one of the heaviest hit pages aside from our online
research tools is
        >our page which provides brief information about the Hudson's Bay
Company.
        >I am fairly sure thatmost of these hits come from casual surfers,
not researchers.
One of my favorite questions (which rarely elicits a response) is what
exactly
does a hit mean? What useful information can we deduce from a page receiving

200 or 2000 hits? My general impression is that historical libraries and
archives,
which rarely have significant patronage vis a vis public libraries, or in
the case of
many academic archives vis a vis the college/university library -- use these
figure
to show the powers that be that somehow we are serving a whole lot more
people
than our patron visit count indicates. How many of those hits found the
information
they wanted? How many of those hits are people who thought they were going
somewhere else? In the case you mention I would guess that many of the hits
were
people seeking specific information (which I would not call a casual surfer)
whether
about the company history or on Hudson's Bay. Is anyone out there trying to
study
and understand their page hits? Using page hits in some way to modify their
web
design?

        >At what point does a casual surfer become a serious researcher?
Excellent question. I don't think we as a profession have directed enough
attention at
user satisfaction and information seeking behaviors. I think these areas of
thought are
extremely important if we are to "open the doors" to our collections
electronically.

        >This is impossible to know.
Perhaps the question then is what types of addditional patrons could we
serve with the information/knowledge we hold in our collections. That was
the jist of what I was trying
to say with my previous post. By identifying a target user group and trying
to provide
an appropriate information resource for that group we might then be able to
study to
what degree we are successful in providing additional access tools beyond
the traditional
finding aid. I believe that putting collections/resources online is a time
consuming and
expensive process which should be undertaken with deliberation, planning and
specific
goals in mind (some of the materials online currently seem to be driven more
by a
"we gotta throw something on the net" mentality).

Access to collections is only one possible aspect of a repository's web
design.

        >I think that potentially many of our clients could start out as
casual surfers.
Perhaps "casual surfer" is too vague a term to be useful. Maybe categorizing
users/web visitors would be more helpful - if we can deduce useful
categories ;-)

In the absence of data about the information seeking behavior of our
patrons/web
visitors I turn to something I can observe and contemplate - the information
seeking
behavior of myself and my friends/family. Most people don't know how to find

information efficiently on the internet (it seems the more important the
information
need, the more likely I am asked to do the search ;-). Their queries to
search engines
often pulls up 100s or 1000s of irrelevant hits and they start wading
through them
until they hopefully run into the data they seek. Statistics suggest that
the average
webpage is viewed for less than a minute (and this is sometimes used as an
argument against providing content - IMHO a very erroneous position which
could
easily lead down the slippery slope taken by some historical museums). I
suspect
that this has much more to do with:
1) Many users quickly realizing that the page/site does not contain the
information sought and they move on to the next site or
2) If it appears that the site, but not the specific page, may contain the
information
sought, users quickly begin their search of the site

I am especially interested in what happens when an information seeker
actually
hits paydirt and finds a webpage with the desired information.

Cheers,
Craig Wright


Craig G. Wright
Associate Curator of Manuscript Acquisitions
Minnesota Historical Society
651.296.7989           craig.wright@mnhs.org

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