seminar
What the Physical Library Can Teach Us about the Digital Library
Surprisingly few naturalistic studies exist of how people select books and music 'in the wild'--that is, in a physical library, bookstore, or music shop. This seminar reports on a series of observational studies of people interacting with large public collections of books and music, spanning 10 years. The insights gained into how people prefer to interact with the collections suggest directions for research and development in providing access to digital collections.
This seminar will be instructive for those who work with and/or are interested in digital collections, including researchers and students in the library and information, education, humanities, computer and communication technologies, as well as librarians in higher education and teacher-librarians in schools.
<p>Sally Jo Cunningham is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Waikato University (New Zealand). She is a founding member of the New Zealand Digital Libraries Research Group, who are the developers of the Greenstone software to support the development and management of digital document collections. Her research primarily focuses on digital library users and their information behaviour, over text, image, video, and music documents; she is particularly interested in how information behaviour changes as people move to digital documents, and in how we can support the 'non-native' behaviour seen with physical collections, in the digital library. Her work is primarily qualitative and ethnographic, though she does indulge in more technically oriented research projects on occasion. She is also an active researcher in the Computer-Human Interaction and Music Information Retrieval communities.</p>