Last Modified

• February 28, 2019

Creator

• Walton, Rachel
  • Affiliation: School of Information and Library Science

Abstract

• In an effort to move towards a practical and user-centered model for online finding aid navigation, this usability study asks -- what kind of navigational features are effective, efficient, and user-valued components within an academic archive's online finding aid? Using Princeton University's Finding Aid website as a prototype, the researcher collected quantitative as well as qualitative data from ten relatively inexperienced online finding aid users as they interacted with and reacted to the finding aid interface in question. The results of the study suggest major navigational difficulties experienced by users included ambiguous and/or unintuitive labeling, unclear relationships between tabs, and insufficient visual cues for certain navigational features. In contrast, user-valued navigation aids included centralized hyperlinked content, nested and hierarchical content tabs, and a collection-level search bar. The paper concludes with ten pragmatic guidelines for archival professionals trying to solve the ongoing puzzle of online archival finding aid usability.

Date of publication

• May 2015

Subject

• Information retrieval--Evaluation
• Finding aids
• Website usability

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.17615/6wkj-4654

Resource type

• Masters Paper

Rights statement

• In Copyright

Advisor

• Tibbo, Helen R.

Degree

• Master of Science in Library Science

Degree granting institution

• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Extent

• 76

Deposit record

• 8762ffcd-85d2-4673-9efa-8cdf5b021337

Parents:

This work has no parents.

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