Gibbons, next generation academics, and ir-plus

Merrilee on the hangingtogether blog, with a catchup post about the fall CNI meeting, drew our attention to a presentation by Susan Gibbons of Rochester, on studying next generation academics (ie graduate students), as preparation for enhancements to their repository system, ir-plus.

I shared a platform with Susan only last year in Sydney, and I was very impressed with their approach of using anthropological techniques to study and learn from their user behaviour. In fact, her Sydney presentation probably had a big influence on the ideas for the Research Repository System that I wrote about earlier (which I should have acknowledged at the time).

Now their latest IMLS-funded research project takes this even further, as preparation for collaborative authoring and other tools integrated with the repository. If you're interested in making your repository more relevant to your users, the report on the user studies they have undertaken so far is a Must-Read! I don't know whether the code at http://code.google.com/p/irplus/ is yet complete...