Understanding the Users and Business Process of the ICPSR Bibliography of Data-Related Literature

Abstract

Poster presented August 17, 2016 at the end of the Research Experience for Master’s Students program at the School of Information at the University of Michigan.

Full text

To identify opportunities to improve the Bibliography,
specifically in the areas of usage and process.
Project Mentors: Elizabeth Moss and Jared Lyle
To gain insight on user satisfaction and sugges-
tions on improvements to the web interface.
The survey was built on Qualtrics and contained items about sat-
isfaction with and interest in the Bibliography, how data are cited
in publications, and demographics. The survey was implemented
on the ICPSR web site in three places.
15 interviews (14 doctoral students, 1 post-doc) were conduct-
ed according to the interview protocol and recorded on a
smartphone. Interviews will be transcribed and analyzed.
To learn about attitudes toward and practices of data citation,
important to the Bibliography because formal data citations
makes data-literature links more easily discoverable.
To optimize the process (in terms of exhaustiveness and eiciency) while ensuring the quality of the product
Who are the Bibliography’s users, and why do they
use it?
How can management optimize the Bibliography’s
business process while ensuring the quality of the
product?
The Bibliography
~70,000
Citaons
The searchable database of citations of ICPSR-held data that aims to
track the impact of ICPSR-held data
Process
Usage
The Project
Data collection is in progress and will continue through AY
2016-17. The number of responses is very low thus far, which is
likely attributable to the time of year.
Web Survey Interviews
Business Process Analysis
Interviews/Shadowing
Interviews and work shadowing were conducted, which then informed a business process analysis documenting the steps that are
performed in creating value, with emphasis on the systems that support this work. Microso Visual Studio 15 and the Unified Model-
ing Language (UML) was used to model the current process in terms of actors, use cases, activities, inputs, and outputs. Since the
analysis of the current process revealed obstacles to Bibliography exhaustiveness and eiciency, the analysis was followed by re-
search for solutions and a set of requirements for a modified process.
The manual data entry involved in the Save Record activity might be
supported by a Zotero translation server or fork thereof (e.g., Wiki-
media’s Citoid) to programmatically retrieve Literature Item metada-
ta. A worker would enter a data item PID via a dialog box in order to
connect the Data item and Literature Item, and then post this Da-
ta-Literature Link as a new record via HTTP to a RESTful layer on top
of the Bibliography database.
& Business Process of the
Understanding the Users
Michael E. Nelson
Department of Media and Information
Michigan State University
michael.nelson@fulbrightmail.org
PURPOSE
METHOD
RESULTS
PURPOSE
Usage
Process
PURPOSE
PURPOSE
METHOD
RESULTS
METHOD
RESULTS
At this stage in transcription and analysis (~33%), themes in-
clude 1) motivations for data citation and 2) research data as
an input on the level of publications or soware packages.
The business process analysis resulted in the identification of two
roles, Bibliography Manager and Bibliographer Worker, and one key
subsystem, BiblioFake (BF - the Bibliography’s administrative inter-
face). Diagrams of the activities and BF use cases highlighted the
centrality of BF for both Manager and Worker and the obstacles that
field-by-field data entry and task-by-task data-literature-link search-
ing present to the process. The subsequent research and require-
ments-writing revealed two opportunities to solve these problems.
OPPORTUNITY ONE
OPPORTUNITY TWO
Drawing on the work of the InFoLiS project, an automated search
agent working behind a dashboard UI could assume the re-
source-consuming and oen redundant task-wise, item-by-item ac-
tivity of searching for data-literature links. This solution would ex-
tract patterns from texts that cite data items, and discovering new
literature items by consuming publisher database APIs.
Stage
Activity
Input
Output
4
Save Record
Data-Literature Link
Record
Intended users:
Funding agencies
Instructors
Principal investigators
Students
Policy-makers
Journalists
Information researchers
Data-Literature Link
Navigate to Form
"New Reference"
Navigate to Form
“RIS Import”
[Metadata RIS formatted] [Metadata not RIS formatted]
Navigate to Source of
Literature Item
Download RIS File From
Source of Literature Item
Upload Literature
Item’s RIS File
Input Literature Item
Metadata Field By Field
Edit Metadata Fields
According to Style Guide
Categorize Literature State
Input Data Item Identifier
Save Record (Without Ad-
ministrative Privileges)
Record