Methodology

Pupose of the Study
Selection of Subjects
Procedure

Purpose of the Study

Among the research questions that MOAC II examines are why users use digital museum objects, what users need to understand about museum objects as sources of information and evidence, and how digital museum objects might be used to enhance classroom teaching at K-12, undergraduate and graduate levels. Evaluation will be the basis for MOAC II partners to recommend strategies to the OAC Manager, CDL University Librarian and wider museum, library and archives communities for improving the value of digital resources and encouraging their use in education and research.

Selection of Subjects

We propose to target four different user groups that have been identified by the California Digital Library as key constituencies for MOAC. These are discussed below (not in any priority order):

1. Museum professionals, librarians and archivists (i.e., information professionals) responsible for working with MOAC at repositories participating in the OAC or MOAC:
Unit heads at each repository will be asked to identify staff members and colleagues who work with MOAC in capacities such as reference and collection management. The names of these staff members will be compiled into a list from which a systematic sample that represents each type of institution will be drawn. Professionals thus identified will be invited to participate in the evaluation study

2. University of California academics in the Humanities and Social Sciences:
Although potentially the holdings of MOAC could be very valuable to scholarly users in an almost infinite number of disciplinary areas, it is beyond the scope of this project to carry out such exhaustive evaluation. Instead, we have chosen to focus on those academics that are likely to constitute the most frequent or substantive users of a resource such as MOAC. Accordingly, we propose to draw a systematic sample of University of California faculty in the humanities and social sciences that will represent a range of disciplinary areas. A second group of faculty will be specifically targeted because of their known use of museum resources in their scholarship and teaching. We propose to identify these faculty by asking reference staff in participating repositories to distribute an invitation to participate in the research to any faculty researchers who fall into the targeted faculty group.

3. University of California students in the Humanities and Social Sciences:
Methodologically, and because of human subjects constraints, it is difficult to identify students, especially at the undergraduate level, to participate in research of this kind. We propose that students would be identified in 3 ways: 1) by asking faculty members in whose courses students have previously been enrolled or who have advised master's or doctoral students using archival resources; 2) by asking reference staff in participating repositories to distribute an invitation to participate in the research to any student researchers who fall into the targeted student group.; and 3) by a call for participation that would be posted within humanities and social science departments on UC campuses. While we are aware that such methods of selecting students is unlikely to yield a sufficiently large sample to be representative of all possible student uses and needs, we believe that this aspect of the evaluation will nevertheless provide us with valuable insight into how students currently or potentially might integrate MOAC into their school activities and workflow. It will also provide valuable insight into student search strategies and aspects of MOAC that they might find intriguing, difficult, or frustrating.

4. K-12 teachers
We propose to identify teachers from a range of grade levels and curricular subjects in two ways: 1) we will approach teachers who have been involved in two other University of California projects that involved California teachers working with primary source collections held by the University. The first of these projects is the UCLA Institute for Primary Resources, a collaborative project between the UCLA Seeds University Elementary School and UCLA Department of Special Collections. For almost a decade, this project has brought Southern California teachers to UCLA to work with Special Collections and integrate them into their course units. The second of these projects is the Interactive University Cultural Heritage Pilot Project based in UC Berkeley, which has worked with a somewhat smaller group of teachers introducing them to the Berkeley online archival collections. 2) We will ask staff responsible for educational programming and K-12 outreach in each repository participating in MOAC to identify schools and teachers with whom they have already worked so that we may contact them about participating in the MOAC evaluation.

Procedure

Participants in this study will be asked to complete an online survey on their use and opinions about the MOAC site. They may also take part in second portion of the study, a hands-on task analysis session and a followup interview.