Proceedings of the First National Joint Conference of Librarians of Color - 147C

minority racial-ethnic groups, women, and international users. Usability feedback and development of the workshop agenda is presented in areas of: demographic and contextual instrumentals; identification of new web resources; overall assessment; personal opinion and preference; usefulness of content and structure; aesthetics; cultural appropriateness; browsing choices; searching capabilities; and bibliographic and metadata contributions. These usability areas were incorporated as zones of focus in the process of planning and design of the workshop with librarians of color. Demographic & Contextual Instrumentals Past users involved in usability testing of the DRP provided feedback about their race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, age, nationality, occupational affiliation, and time of residency in the region. Based on gathered data, an important finding was that users sought and preferred ways to create personalized DRP diversity folders in which they could contribute information about information resources and services that they often used. The nature of contributed information was closely related to an intersection of various variables of diversity that participants identified with. For example, if a participant identified herself as a Black woman from a southern state and an elderly lesbian, she wanted the option to create multiple folders in a personalized digital library. She also wanted to organize information in multiple folders based on her different needs, interests, and skills that were connected to her self-identification with the various labels. Such an understanding helped the workshop organizers recognize the need for provision of a range of options and adequate representation in multiple avenues for librarians of color in their web profiles. Also, another related workshop outcome was to provide opportunities for participating librarians of color to present their own diversity variables that they identified with in their web profiles, instead of imposing diversity variables for them to select. identification with various categories associated with diversity. Additionally, prior participants’ choices of suggested web resources were closely related to their past zone of familiarity with digital information. For example, international students contributed information about their home countries as well as their disciplines as represented in the home countries. They wanted to see more information in specific folders for individual countries related to different geographic and cultural areas around the world. In addition, international users wanted to see sub-folders, within the country folders, which contained information about different disciplines in the various countries. One workshop application from this finding was to allow librarians of color participants to contribute new information about web resources from their own local and regional areas, in addition to local information services that they had used in the past. Overall Assessment Based on prior usability studies where users gave a positive assessment about the DRP and reported that it filled a specific gap of access to currently isolated and fragmented information on diversity, workshop organizers realized the need for providing opportunities to participating librarians of color to personalize the digital collection and contribute their “piece” in creating a resource that might be useful to others. Consequently, the workshop agenda realized its focus on individual users and their needs, interests, and skills, in order to develop a digital collection on diversity that was current and visible. Personal Opinion & Preference Questions on personal opinion in past usability studies were directed at users to gather feedback about whether they would recommend the resource to others and if they would return to use the digital library at a later date. All users provided an affirmative response to both the questions and gave the following reasons for their positive opinion about the DRP: it provided information resources that participants had not found elsewhere; the DRP was organized in a simple manner and retrieved local information that was related to participant needs; the system was easy-to-use; and, the DRP had the potential to allow for personalized retrieval and storage. Workshop organizers structured feedback mechanisms to gather suggestions from participating Identification of New Web Resources From past DRP organizers realized people recommend collection are a usability studies, workshop that new web resources that to be added to the DRP direct reflection of their 147A
Proceedings of the First National Joint Conference of Librarians of Color

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Proceedings of the First National Joint Conference of Librarians of Color
