An Update

Our group - the fab four - has been quite busy this semester. We've developed a master schedule for gathering information, have visited and interviewed with area women's shelters and we have been searching for a group to host our site.

iBiblio has agreed to host our site on the condition that we find a campus organization to maintain it. This is our current dilemma; because all of us are students and won't be at the university forever, we can't be responsible for keeping the site updated. We've checked with a few student organizations and hopefully, one will pan out!

A Final Word

Tour Information

We didn't have a lot of suggestions for changing our tour, except for Teri's question about time and timing. Alex and I decided to address this issue in our discussion. Time and timing certainly could fit in with Dunne's phases of information needs of battered women - depending on the situation. The information seeking behavior of battered women is more situational than anything else. I brought this up in the presentation, but I will reiterate my point here. For example, one woman may want to plan her escape and recovery from abuse in the beginning and may want to be in a state of information overload. On the other hand, a different woman may not be ready to learn about finding her own apartment and may just want to get out of the abusive relationship for now. Depending on the person and the situation, women may/may not be ready for information at various times/phases in the information seeking process.

My Final Thoughts on Class

This semester I've been introduced to some unique user perspectives that I've never thought of before. Taking an entire semester to study the information needs of the less popular information poor was quite valuable. In most of the other classes, we focus on the information needs of the majority; and the majority is quite overstudied. Unfortunately, those with unique needs are in the minority and information professionals may inadverdently ignore their needs. This class has taught me to think about the needs of every user. If we never sit down and try to meet the needs of those who don't use our systems, they never will and our users will stay the same; because of this, our systems and our technologies will not grow. This is something that most be avoided; innovation is critical and to be innovative in the information seeking field we must design systems around each individual user. We should step out of our comfort zones!

Week 14 Tour Update

For our tour this week, we sat back and waited for our classmates to comment on our presentation. Thus far, our comments have been very positive. Alex and I have included everything we wanted to include in our tour, hopefully without causing our own information overload!

This was actually the hardest part of our tour; because we were overloaded with information it was really easy to overload others. Even though we wanted to convey this sentiment, we did not want to spread on the incredible amount of disorganized information to others! Having said that, for the most part it was easy to organize our presentation because we modeled after a scientific research paper with an introduction, a literature review, methodology, analysis, discussion, conclusion, and even future work. The hard part to organize was our 'journey' because it was a confusing one! We decided the best way to discuss the places we went and the things we found by discussing each one individually in the order we visited them. By illustrating this with photos, I think our presnetation is easy to follow and enjoyable - who doesn't like looking at pictures? :)

Week 13 Tour Update

This past week Alex and I put together our presentation and posted it online to the discussion board. We went through some interesting trials as we put everything together ...

One interesting story is our quest for the Family Violence Prevention Center's website. We were working on our project in the SILS lab and were trying to remember the FVPC's site; the problem was we didn't have our pamphlets with us so we were trying to recall it from memory - we both knew the site existed, or at least it was advertised, so we tried our first guess: fvpc.org. This brought us to a church's website so we Googled 'family violence prevention center of chapel hill, nc'. This brought up lots of opportunities to volunteer with the center, but no information on the center or its services.

Since we couldn't find ANYTHING we decided to call them (thanks to Google maps we had the number). The staff member who answered the phone informed me that the site was fvpc.org; when I told her we had tried that and it didn't work she replied with "let me try it, maybe my Internet here is different". Obviously, she also got the church site; she then told me that they had just switched technology coordinators and that perhaps the site was down and would be back soon but the address was definitely fvpc.org; well, this obviously wasn't true. Later, Alex and I found their site in our notes 'fvpcoc.org'. It was still interesting that we very much could NOT find their site, even when we asked the organization. Interestingly enough, fvpcoc.org is a very good site with lots of helpful information - if you can find it.

One thing we really wanted to get across and focus on was our actual, physical tour. We wanted to stress the 'information overload' aspect as well as the fact that we didn't really know where to start or where to go for what information (besides the Rape Crisis Center, which is obvious). We tried to stress this in our presentation through pictures ... I hope you enjoy it!

Week 12 Tour Update

Just to keep the blog going week to week ...

Alex and I spent the afternoon re-visiting our tour stops:

1. Carolina Women's Center
2. The Family Violence Prevention Center
3. Orange County Rape Crisis Center
4. The Women's Center of Chapel Hill

We went around and took pictures for our presentation and collected any new information we found. This week we found information on domestic violence at The Women's Center for South Asians. This was interesting because the only two languages we've seen have been either English or Spanish.

We are continuing to learn new things about a very unique group of users - battered women.

Scrapbook - Unit 11

11.08.07

Oftentimes I feel as though there is a disconnect between what we learn and discuss in class versus what we can realistically do when we join the 'practical' world. It is rare that we read a study that incorporates the working world; instead, researchers tend to survey students or other academics - most likely because this is an easy audience to come across. However, as someone who wants to work and use the knowledge I have gained at SILS in a practical sense, I think it would be most beneficial to me to read studies on practitioners.

When I wrote my undergraduate thesis at SILS, I want to discuss my qualitative methods from a feminist standpoint - i.e., using feminist research methods. (I used a hybrid study of both quantitative and qualitative measures; I also took research methods both in SILS and the Women's Studies department). I was discouraged from saying I was analyzing my qualitative data from a feminist standpoint because 'certain IS researchers' would see my research as non-scientific and thus, invalid. Likewise, when I took research methods as a graduate student, we were told that quantitative is considered 'hard' science and qualitative methods are considered 'soft' science. Having done both, I would argue that neither route is easy by any means and I actually think that quantitative data is much easier to manipulate than qualitative data. I can manipulate statistics and no one would question it - but you can't deny would people report in interviews or ethnographic studies. Judging academics based on social or traditional sciences isn't fair to either discipline and truly limits the ways in which we can expand our research. To grow as a field, we must be open to the ideas of others, which is what I believe Dervin was trying to tell us in her essay.

I really enjoyed reading the article by Gerber and Grunes. This seems to be one of the most user-focused plans I have encountered in IS research. Obviously we always discuss taking the user into account, but this is the first practical implementation I've seen that truly uses the user's needs in building a system. At the end of the article they mention that people made comments like 'this is similar to how we find solutions in books' - statements like this illustrate the fact that it is not always a good idea to bring in something totally new; sometimes it is better to improve a system the user is already familiar with, like browsing in books.

Their method of designing the system is what truly intrigued me. They outline five steps:

1. "Brainstorm design concepts,

2. Develop an initial prototype that could be demonstrated to focus groups of art directors,
3. Refine the prototype based on focus group comments,
4. Conduct user testing to establish usability, productivity measurements and determine user attitudes about the program, and
5. Iteratively refine and test the user interface." (p. 161)
   

I think this is an excellent model for designing systems and interfaces; having a concise, formal design process is key to coming out with a good end-product. And if you aren't designing the system/interface for the users, what's the point? All in all, Gerber and Grunes do an excellent job of illustrating how the design process can and should be built around the needs of the user.

Update on our Tour

I think Alex and I have already found many gaps that need to bridged for our tour that directly relates to joining the needs of the designer to the needs of the user. Last week, we took a physical tour of all of the Women's Centers in Chapel Hill and were immediately overwhelmed with information. The problem with the battered women is that it's hard enough for them to go out in search of information to get help, but once they hit a road block along the way they become frustrated and oftentimes stop seeking help via information. The reason so many women hit road blocks is because they don't know which Women's Center to go to for which services. Not to reveal too much about our tour before you are all dazzled with our presentation :), but we were immediately confronted with the problem of which Women's Center to go to for all of the many information needs that battered women are confronted with. The reason for this problem, we believe, is that most non-profit community centers (Women's Centers for instance) are under-funded and we have been told that the first budget item cut is outreach services. Without outreach services, the user (battered women) will never know where to go or how to find their information.

Tour Update - Week 10

Now that Alex and I have done a good bit of background research on our tour topic, we have learned so much about the information needs of this particular population. One of the most important lessons has been that every woman, in every situation, is unique because of the emotions and state of mind that come with this environment; thus her search needs are also unique. This article by Jennifer Dunne was particularly useful because it analyses the needs of battered women at various places in abuse (i.e., the beginning, help seeking, going back/staying out, etc.).

Dunne, J. E. (2002). "Information seeking and use by battered women: A 'person-in-progressive-situations' approach". In Library and Information Science Research, V. 24, p. 343-355.

Dunne uses Allen's person-in-situation model (see citation below) which looks at how people in certain situations, and in various stages of these situations, seek information. Dunne says that the information seeking context here is defined by what she terms 'personal and situational factors' (emotions and state of mind or mental health) as well as the individual woman's response to the situation. Dunne's article basically takes Allen's approach and analyses other articles on the needs of battered women. The author looks at the various stages the abused woman goes through: the need for emotional support, securing help and a plan to escape, securing safety and shelter, and follow-up emotional support. Her conclusions are that the information needs of this group of people changes throughout each of these stages AND is dependent upon the individual's situation and emotional response. For public libraries, Dunne reports that they should serve as an information central, so to speak, for these women. Libraries should have information useful to women in every stage of this situation. They should also coordinate these services with organizations in the community who help battered women: social workers, police officers, lawyers, women's centers, etc.

Citation for the theoretical basis of Dunne's article:

Allen, B. (1996). Information needs: A person-in-situation approach. In P. Vakkari, R. Savolainen, & B. Dervin (Eds.), Information seeking in context: Proceedings of an International Conference on Research in Information Needs, Seeking and Use in Different Contexts (pp. 111-122). Tampere, Finland: Taylor Graham.

The person-in-situation model was used in this article and obviously reflects a situational perspective. However, I think this model directly relates to the Information Use Environments (IUE) because of the situation. What I mean is that these women are in very unique environments, one of abuse, and therefore, their access to not only information, but emotional support and safety may be very limited. Their environment is what forms their situations. Using this model shows the information professional just how unique this particular set of information seekers are, and points out all of the obstacles blocking access to information for this group.

Scrapbook - Unit 10

11.02.06

Taylor's article on Information Use Environments does bring up a very appealing approaching to designing information systems. Taking a look at the user based on where they are coming from in their searching seems to be a good idea but I can imagine the difficulties one would face in applying this in a real world setting. Where do you draw the line for a group of people? For engineers there are computer, network, and mechanical - these groups certainly have differing information needs, is it fair to generalize them all in one group? Where do you draw the line?

I do applaud the idea that everyone has unique information needs based on not just their environment, but their education, their situation, among other factors. And while it is not possible to please everyone and perfectly meet their information needs, I think that these differences must be taken into consideration when designing information systems.

Hershberger's article shows how different groups of people who aren't typical information seekers need information. I think article's like Hershberger's and Dewdney and Harris' on battered women are very important because they bring up the non-typical searcher. Most of the articles we read are either about the medical world (which I'm suspecting is because there is lots of money in that field) or the corporate world. This reminds me of Chatman's study of the information poor - those that are not typical information seekers and may not have unlimited access the way other groups do but who have very unique information needs.

Battered women and abused children are interesting groups to study because of their unique situations. Both groups may not have access to the information they need to get help, find safety, support, or simply reassurance. If libraries began keeping information needed by these groups perhaps more people (women and children) would get the help they need. Studying specific, non-typical domains needs to be done more in the LIS world; we typically seem to study those that use our information systems - wouldn't it broaden our user group (and our own perspectives) to bridge out and try to help those not using our systems?