Early Posts from ASIST: Tuesday Even though these are late, I'm still keeping with the early convention in the title. Basically, that's to indicate that these are more summary-type than deep analysis. Also, all this fades with time so I'm running against the clock in posting before it disappears completely. Never again will I attend a conference without some sort of computer.

I left after the first speaker in the first session so I could meet with the people presenting with me at 10:30.

Studying Scientific Collaboration, Part 1: Methodology for Investigating Collaboration
Henry Small from ISI spoke about something. At this point I remember him talking about the trend of more authors per article, all professionals who are members of a project being automatically listed as co-authors, increased internationality of co-authorship... he said eventually every physicist would be an author of every paper...

Blogs for KM and Information Dissemination
There's more that you'll ever want to know about this on the appropriate blog. I'll also continue to post more information on the subject there.

Awards Luncheon
I liked the chicken. Luckily Dr. Soergel held a seat for me because it was packed. I learned from the first reception not to get between these people and their food!

Managing Information from Scientific Research Projects

• Suzanne Cristina from UTC spoke about some of the efforts they've made to have lessons learned, etc., available to their staff. Very KM, very 90s but it's working for them.
  
• Jayne Dutra from JPL (a cool place with some of the same interests as I've got) spoke about developing the NASA taxonomy. You have to hand it to her and her team because they really took the user's needs into account. They specifically built it to be flexible and also just used the words that the subject matter experts recommended.

-- after that I ran over to see the very cool Maryland project --
Design for Helping Users
Bringing Together Children and Books: An Initial Descriptive Study of Children's Book Searching and Selection Behavior in a Digital Library
Kara Reuter and Allison Druin
When I first heard about the ICDL a couple of years ago, I spent way too much time flipping through the books. This is really a neat project. Kara was talking about when they actually went to a suburban Maryland school and interviewed and watched the kids use the ICDL. They found that the younger children opened every book, while the older children were better able to see from the metadata if they had what they wanted. Also, the kids typically did a lot of searching for Harry Potter, but that's not surprising. The children all enjoyed looking at books written in unfamiliar languages -- that's pretty cool. They also did a lot of diffuse searching -- flipping backward and forward and clicking on things. I wish I knew this was typical behavior before when I was trying to "help" the children at the public library. I guess it's just normal.

Methodologies for User Studies

• Survey of Learner's Knowledge Structures
  Peiling Wang, Stephen Bales, Jason Teiger, and Yan Zhang
  She basically talked about knowledge maps and trying to design instruments to adequately measure student's understanding of the relationships between concepts. To me it came across as an infinitely more painful "always, sometimes, never" test. There were drop down boxes between each pair of terms and the student had to pick which term described the relationship - it could then be mapped by the system. I'm not sure I actually got it, but I am glad I never had to take any tests like that!
  
• Measuring the Affective Information Environment of Web Searchers
  Diane Nahl
  It's all about anxiety, uncertainty, optimism. People do better on searches when they're optimistic. There's a lot more to her model. I hope it's used to inform design.
  
• Effect of Taks on Time Spent Reading as an Implicit Measure of Interest
  Melanie Kellar, Carolyn Watters, Jack Duffy and Michael Shepherd
  I didn't really take any notes on this, but it's pretty complicated. Their subjects had to judge relevance of a newswire article, answer short and more descriptive questions with other articles. I think with this, if you're in a cluttered environment, it would really show interest if you stopped everything and kept or read the article -- but that's near to impossible to study. More still needs to be done here to nail this down.
  

Missed SIG CON but had a lovely dinner.  ¶ 3:47 PM| |cites (technorati) |