Age: 62
Location: San Jose, California
Background
Loren is a 62 year old administrative assistant at an insurance company in San Jose, CA. After work, he sometimes heads over to the public library to find new books to read. Recently, he’s become interested in learning about his ancestry. Family records trace his heritage as far back as his maternal great great-grandfather, John Williams, but he doesn’t know much detail about his life yet. He stumbled onto Yale Digital Collections through a Google results page, and has been using it to try to find out more information about an ancestor, John Williams. He doesn’t experiment with any advanced features on the site -- He generally sticks to full-text search to help him find what he’s looking for. Online Activities He did not start as an enthusiastic user of technology but has found some sites helpful in his research, notably genealogy.com and genealogybooklinks.com, Google and the Digital Archive of Norway http://arkivverket.no/Digitalarkivet. Recently he has started a blog to detail the information he has found and to connect with distant relatives. Typically uses the public library to find new books to read.
Uses public library to browse and check out books and DVDs Access newspapers and other genealogy sources in print Search the online catalog for sources and their availability Searches full-text and collections, and restricts to full-view items even though most of what he's looking for is from before 1922 Uses Google, Genealogy.com, and Genealogybooklinks.com frequently
Technology
PC and a Kindle.
Use Case
Interested in finding records about alumni and wants to search by a name, John Williams.
Success
Loren is able to
- Find material from multiple sources, including the Yale Daily News digital archive, and Manuscripts and Archives
- Use a facet which limits to Yale historical material
- Discover material and determine what is available in print and what is available in digital format
- Order material to be digitized
Persona adapted from HathiTrust genealogist persona (http://www.hathitrust.org/documents/HathiTrust_Personas.pdf)