BHL User Needs Analysis

September 9, 2021

About Carolyn

Carolyn served as Project Manager on the Field Book Project (2010-2013) and as Program Manager for the Biodiversity Heritage Library (2013-2019). During her time with BHL, she did extensive research into BHL user needs. She worked closely with National Digital Stewardship Resident, Pamela McClanahan and the User Needs Analysis project for the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). Carolyn is currently a Senior Information Technology Project Manager at The Nature Conservancy.

1. Across user groups “search” was cited as the key frustration and a feature request. I was wondering if you could elaborate on this a bit?

It is important to note that the study was done before full-text search (which addressed a lot of what people were looking for with BHL Search)

2. What were people looking for?

People were looking for specific articles. Full-text search helped address this but still a lot more work to do. Additionally, users wanted:

• More fuzzy matching for misspellings etc.

• More faceting and refining 

• Some open-ended/anecdotal suggestions -- look at the data for these

3. What was the culmination of this work? Were user personas, stories, and feature requirements developed for BHL’s technical plan?

• Personas, user stories were not part of the project but there was some classification of them.

• The final wrap-up of this work consisted of the BHL Tech Team meeting-up to identify top priorities from the NSDR reports. (2018)

• Martin also used to put together one-pager of top technical priorities that drew on the work.

• The User Needs Analysis did help to prioritize and focus efforts on:

  • full text search (deployed 2018/2019)

  • functionality to import transcriptions (they decided to import them rather than build out a crowd-sourcing tool because a community management role is needed for the latter and there was no capacity or funding for such a role)
    

4. Related to above user classes – for the classes of users that were defined in the study, were more granular sub classes created?

End-users were broken down a bit more in the survey (you can see those in the report)

5. What opportunities/challenges do you think semantic enrichment of the BHL's corpus will present?

• Opportunities

  • Biggest opportunities are around normalizing named entities / URIs for authors names 

  • Geo names (a lot of research is geographically based)

  • Geo names extraction (there was a 10 week project from University of Leeds looking to do just this) 

  • Collections managers are really interested in attribution for collectors and the specimens that are cited in the research. They want to be able to track use of these specimens across the scholarly corpus. 

    • These statistics would justify funding by showing the use of the collections (see: Andy Bently @ University of Kansas, organized an attribution workshop)

6. Anecdotally, how enthusiastic did BHL users seem in participating in crowdsourcing or even a “MyBHL” feature? 

• Users would definitely be interested in the results of crowdsourcing but there was lukewarm interest from users in participating in a MyBHL 

• There are a lot of considerations around a feature like this. Requires a lot of resources and dedication to staff to manage the community. 

7. What would you see as a continuation of this work and should more research be done?

There is a definite need to continue this work; this past year (with the pandemic) has caused digital expectations of BHL as a platform to rise.

8. Do you think that BHL’s UX Research should be constant and iterative then?

Yes (note: BHL has never had a UX Designer/Researcher – this has been an enduring capacity gap)

9. If the BHL could do just one thing to better serve the needs of its users what do you think that would be?

• Figure out how we can help people do research in light of climate change. What are the new big research questions?

• People are doing more in-depth research during this time, people are developing new areas of expertise, the more that can be done with geographic references over time – would be really useful

• Other collections combined with BHL might help answer key questions

• Investigate BHL’s role in the Wikidata community in terms of shaping the data model that drives biodiversity research.