Chat Transcript with St. Bonaventure Univ. Librarian 5am Oct 5 2010

Chat Transcript
Other than in "technical communication" journals, where else might I find information about user-authored content?

5:16:29
Librarian 'St. Bonaventure Univ. Librarian Ann has joined the session.

Hello Tara

I'm Ann, a librarian in New York State

Your library and mine work together to staff this service

Hi Ann

When you say "user-authored," what type of item/software/etc. are these users using?

It could be software or hardware. For example, there are many unofficial user forums that talk about how to use the Palm Pixi smart phone. My theory is that users seek out help from each other before going to the official documentation.

That is interesting. Let me think about how we could approach this in a search! I'm thinking one way to approach this might be to take a look at how users groups function. I'll pull up a list of databases from your library, so we can try this theory out.

ME: Yes, that is someting I hadn't thought of - the discourse communities and how they function might be interesting to research.

Librarian: I see that your library has Academic Search Premier -- that might be a good database to use to start. This search string retrieved some articles that might be relevant: computer AND "user group"

ME: I think I'm looking for more about the psychological reasons why someone would trust another user over the corporate documentation.

Librarian: Okay that gives me some additional ideas for ways to search. We would look for information on whether users found corporation documentation, or online help provided by the vendor, difficult to use as well.

Try (DE "COMPUTER users") or (DE "COMPUTER users -- Attitudes"). Some of the articles here look interesting and this search string can be combined...

Me: Yes thank you - I found "User attitudes towards news content personalization" I tried "Psychology" + "Web 2.0" also.

Summary
This librarian provided me another search avenue - whether or not the users found online help provided by the vendor to be difficult to use. Maybe that's why they prefer user communities over "vendor" help. There must be some research that points to this - perhaps someone has conducted a study and found that users attitudes towards "vendor" help is that the "vendor" help is difficult to use.