Name: George 

Age: 55

Department: American Studies

Background

George is a 55 year old professor of History and American Studies. He generally teaches one to two courses a semester (graduate and undergraduate), and frequently advises graduate students. He frequently writes op-ed pieces and is interviewed by the media in his area of expertise. He is a frequent user of library services and expert at finding and utilizing archival sources.

Typical Library Activities         

• Research on current writing project
• Checks on the availability of a book in the Orbis catalog.
• Puts in a request to get a book from Borrow Direct.
• Searches for and requests copies of articles and other resources.
• Schedules biblio/archival instruction session for students in course.
• Uses course reserves for student readings.
• Looks for images that he can use in his lectures.
• Has his students complete an assignment using material from MSSA.
• He also frequently uses Google and Google books in his research.

Name: William

Age: 35

Department: Anthropology Department

Fluent in English, Hebrew and Arabic.

Background

William is currently teaching three classes and is also writing an article. He needs to find material published in the Middle East and searches in the vernacular for relevant books, articles and other resources.

A sophisticated user who spends significant amounts of time online, uses Youtube for research and teaching, Google Scholar, JSTOR. Uses Twitter to keep up with a group of colleagues with similar interests. Maintains a library of article and book citations in Endnote. Finds material online and saves copies on his laptop, but will print out long articles for reading, and after finding books online will borrow them in print from the library or Borrow Direct.  When teaching he uses ClassesV2 and electronic reserves.

Library Activities

• Searches for materials published in the Middle East.
• Searches in the vernacular.
• Uses finding aids.

Name: Ned

Age: 45

Location: University of Chicago

Department: English

Background

In the course of his research Ned discovers a Beinecke collection with material he needs through a Google search.  He first wishes to speak with a curator to determine if the material in the collection is really what he thinks. After a discussion he determines that the collection does have material he wants and he would like to arrange a visit to the archives at Yale. To get the most use out of his visit, he wishes to order the material to be available for him to look at on a specific date.

Library Activities

• Searches Google for exposed Finding Aids
• Reviews Finding Aids to determine if collection is of interest
• Uses Aeon request forms to request materials for study

Name: Darrell

Age: 45

Occupation: Librarian

Location: New Haven, CT

Background

Darrell Jones is a reference and instructional librarian. He's been working as a librarian for 5 years, and he loves hunting down the right resources for himself and his patrons.

Recently a patron came in looking primary resources on the Vietnam War. Darrell went straight to FindIt because he knows the patron wants online resources and wanted to search Yale archival resources as well as published sources.

Darrell loves having Yale’s online resources at his fingertips, and uses them for his own research as well. He is hoping to publish an article he has been writing about the history of undergraduate education, and he has found many useful sources through Yale Library. He's created a collection of documents relevant to his subject as a convenient way of showcasing and bookmarking the resources he's been using.

Libra​ry Activities         

• Uses library resources all the time as both patron and for delivery of services.
  • Browse and check out books and dvds
  • Searches the online catalog for sources and their availability
  • Searches full-text and collections
  • Teachings others in the use of library resources
• Uses other internet resources as well.
• Answers reference requests.
• Curates course-specific collections bibliographies and online resources, for students. who increasing want to be pointed to digitized primary resources.
• Generates subject guides using Libguides.

Persona adapted from HathiTrust librarian persona (http://www.hathitrust.org/documents/HathiTrust_Personas.pdf [7])

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 [8]. 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 [7])

Name: Amanda 

Age: 25

Year: Final year of PhD

Major: Anthropology, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences

Background

Amanda is actively working on a dissertation. She is writing about the residents of a city in the United States where the economy has changed from being largely dependent on heavy industry to one based on tourism and revenue from casinos. 

Library Activities         

• Searches for primary sources for her dissertation topic.
• Requests access to special collections at multiple locations throughout the library system.
• Uses EndNote to build a bibliography.
• Uses browser bookmarks to access Anthropology Plus, AnthroSource, and World Development Indicators.
• Checks on the availability of a books in the Orbis catalog.
• Requests books from Borrow Direct.
• Searches for and requests copies of articles and other resources.
• Mines bibliographies and citation lists for articles and books she wants to consult. When she knows the title of an article she often uses Google so that she can quickly find the article.
• She uses print for longer reading (entire books). She does like to check an online chapter to see if the book looks appropriate.
• Renews books in her Orbis account.

Name: William

Age: 20

Year: Junior

Major: United States History
 

Background

William is in the early stages of planning his senior essay. While he has not completely narrowed his topic, he is interested in writing about the Black Panther trials held in New Haven in 1970. Material he would like to find include first-hand accounts written by the accused, and news reports of unrest in New Haven during the trials. He has used archival material before, and is familiar with using finding aids and how archival collections are arranged. In the past he has learned that it is helpful to do a lot of work on the phone with an archive before visiting. He is hoping that there is material available at Yale that he will be able to use for this paper. He does not expect a lot of digitized material to be available. 

Library Activities         

• Looks for practical information about the library (hours, study locations).
• Checks on the availability of a book in the Orbis catalog.
• Makes extensive use of Borrow Direct.
• Uses Google Scholar for research.
• Mines bibliographies and citation lists for articles and books he wants to read. When he knows the title of an article he often uses Google so that he can quickly link to JSTOR, his favorite online resource.
• He uses print for longer reading (entire books). He does like to check an online chapter to see if the book looks appropriate.
• Renews books.

Name: Emily

Age: 19

Year: Sophomore

Major: Political Science

Library Activities

When Emily is doing work for class she often starts in Google Scholar. She finds most articles there have fulltext and likes the ease of access. She also uses e-reserves from within ClassesV2  She likes to study in Bass and sometimes looks online for information about when the library is open. She uses computer labs in Bass because of specialized statistics software available there, and for printing. She also uses Orbis to check on the availability of books and reserves. She has used Borrow Direct to get books from other libraries. She prefers online resources. She has recently been looking at online newspapers for Kenya, where she is applying for a summer internship.