Methods to Tame the Madness: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Assessment Techniques for Online Finding Aid and Website Design

Abstract

© 2012 Rachael Hu Methods to Tame the Madness: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Assessment Techniques for Online Finding Aid and Web Site Design ~ Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t. ~ Hamlet, act 2, sc. 2 S hakespeare could hardly have anticipated the proliferation of Web resources and content available to academic researchers in the twentieth century, yet the common expression “method in the madness” derived from his work is strangely applicable to assessing how users engage with these rich and complicated resources. With the ubiquity of Internet connectivity and electronic devices, searching for information has become an almost exclusively online endeavor. For the special collection librar- ies and archives that deal in primary source collections and a variety of material formats, the online presentation of their materials gives rise to special challenges due to the complex nature of the descriptive records that provide access to the collections they manage. For archival collections, a formally structured descrip- tive document known as a finding aid has been used to describe their content and organization. In the 1990s, the traditional paper-based finding aid made its way into the Internet age and was transitioned into the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) standard, a machine-readable XML-based format designed to facilitate its online dis- play and indexing. 1 This new format precisely captured and translated the inherent structure of the finding aid into an online environment. The EAD standard also enabled archival collections to become systematically discoverable on the World Wide Web for the first time and encouraged the growth of Web sites dedicated to the aggregation of these descriptive records as well as providing environments to view digitally scanned facsimiles of objects from these collections. As the creation and development of Web content—both commercial and academ- ic—grew, an important indicator of an archives’ continued value became a user- 1. Library of Congress, “EAD: Encoded Archival Description Version 2002 Official Site,” available online at www.loc.gov/ead/. *Please note: URLs for all Web sites referenced herein were valid at the time of article submission.