INLS 520 - Course Project - Identifying and evaluating objectives

• These user groups should have different levels of needs.
  
• If stuck, guide your thinking by asking:
  
  • Do individuals or small groups collect and use this kind of thing? What would they need from this collection?
    
  • If people were to study this collection in a scholarly manner, what sort of access to this information would they want?
    
  • What would "random Internet users" want out of a site to share information about this?
    

• Note if the general objective applies to this group's needs
  
• Does the objective apply to this group at all?
  
• Are there specifics you would add or changes you would make to tailor the objectives to this user group?
  
• Would an information organization system need to meet any additional objectives in order to meet the needs of this group?
  

1. Individual with personal collection of recipes. A casual foodie with a mid-sized personal collection of recipes in cookbooks, in magazines, clipped or on index cards, printed out from the web or photocopied from books/magazines, or stored on the computer.
2. Users of a recipe web site. The site crawls food blogs and aggregates and organizes recipes. Food bloggers may use the site to find people interested in similar things and to promote their blogs. Non-food bloggers use the site to find recipes—new or seen before.
3. Food educators. Teachers at a culinary school. These schools have vast collections of recipes (and menus). Instructors need to find recipes to use in their classes. Class sessions may center on a type of dish, a certain kind of ingredient, or a certain cooking technique.

• Finding - To locate a specific, known recipe by searching using that recipe's attributes or relationships.
• Collocating - To locate sets of recipes consisting of all recipes: for a particular dish; using an ingredient or combination of ingredients; from a particular region or culture; meeting a specific dietary restriction; from a given source.
• Identifying - To identify a recipe by confirming it is the recipe sought, or by distinguishing different recipes for the same dish.
• Selecting - To select a recipe appropriate to the user's needs with respect to cooking skill, available ingredients, time required, tools/equipment required, or dietary restrictions.
• Acquiring - To enable a user to locate a recipe, or copy of it, if the system is not organizing the recipes themselves (in which case, the recipe would be the record presented to the user).
• Navigating - To navigate a recipe collection to find related recipes—similar recipes, recipes using the product of a recipe as an ingredient, recipes for ingredients called for in a recipe.

Another unique thing about the individual's situaton is that most individuals do not have data entry minions (though many of us long for them). This means that the individual is responsible for any maintenance or organization of the recipe collection. These tasks must be fit in between any other pressing tasks.

• Finding - To find recipes in a collection as the result of a search using document attributes and contextual cues should be supported. When people have seen or used documents before, they may more strongly remember information such as "what I made last Thanksgiving," "it was on a stained index card," or "I got it from Sue," than attributes related to the actual informational content of the recipe.
• Collocating - To locate sets of all recipes that meet remembered document attributes and contextual cues. In the individual collection, this objective is probably unattainable. People have recipes in many different formats—not all electronic. In order to achieve true collocation, systems typically require the person to input all the recipes into a database. Is this necessary? Could a system ask the person to input only the most important info about the recipe and its physical location, so that it acts as an index to recipes instead of a database of recipes?
• Selecting - No particularly special objective.
• Acquiring - Discussion under collocating is also relevant here.
• Navigating - Enable user to create associative trails like the "Memex" idea.
• Organizing - Since individual users will have to do the organization of this information themselves, the system must provide a streamlined, simple way to put information into the system.

…Repeat for other group(s)…