Information seeking and retrieval as a leisure activity

1
Information seeking and retrieval as a leisure
activity

• Richard Butterworth
• r.j.butterworth_at_mdx.ac.uk
• Interaction Design Centre
• Middlesex University

2
Hypothesis

• People who perform ISR behaviour as part of a
  hobby have different characteristics to those
  normally reported in the literature
• How different?
• Implications for DL design?

3
Accessing our Archival and Manuscript Heritage
project

• 14 month project at Senate House Library,
  University of London
• Broadening access to library resources for
  life long learners
• Funded by Electronic Access to Resources in
  Libraries and LASER fund
• Completed September 2005
• Also development of DL resources for folk music
  library, and study of photographic custodians

4
Personal history research

• Local or family history research
• Very popular lately
• Undertaken as a hobby activity
• Family history research turns into local (and
  other) history
• Information authoring as well as seeking and
  retrieval
• Surprisingly well defined research questions

5
Social activity

• Information audience is friends and family
• Collaboration in small groups or individuals
• Local and family history groups
• Sharing skills, not results
• Purely social
• Sporadic and occasional
• Intermediation/collaboration roles blurred

6
Motivation

• ISR for pleasure?
• Kulthaus model shows negative emotions
• Research into self
• Incremental build up of rewards

7
A model of ISR as a leisure activity

• Amateurism ? amateurish
• Well articulated ASKs
• ISR for its own sake
• Deliberate generation of ASKs
• Berry picking
• Sense of ownership of the ASK
• Social context in Ingwersen and Järvelins ISR
  model

8
Implications for DL design

• Social activity intermediation
• Hybridised CSCW and DL system
• No assumption of knowledge of how a library works
• Berry picking browsing, not searching

9
Conclusions

• Sketch of user characteristic is informal and
  anecdotal
• Big generalisations made
• Formal user studies and ethnography?
• Problems due to sporadic nature
• Library staff as indirect sources
• No organisational context roles and
  responsibilities?