In this article, we present findings from a survey of nearly 600 university employees' e-mail use. The study provides a detailed comparison of use patterns between work and personal e-mail accounts. Our results suggest that users engage in more "keeping" behaviors with work e-mail than with personal e-mail-respondents reported more frequent use of keeping actions and larger inbox sizes for their work accounts. However, we found correlations between individual respondents' e-mail behaviors in the two contexts, indicating that personal preferences can play a role. We also report results pointing to e-mail as an important boundary management artifact. We show evidence that the use of multiple e-mail accounts may be a work-personal boundary placement strategy, but also observe that a fair amount of boundary permeation occurs through e-mail. To our knowledge, this study is one of the first to compare e-mail use in both work and personal contexts across the same sample. Our findings extend prior research on personal information management regarding e-mail use, and help inform the role of e-mail in managing work-personal boundaries. The results have implications for the design of e-mail systems, organizational e-mail policies, user training, and understanding the impacts of technology on daily life.

Sampling the natural world and built environment underpins much of science, yet systems for managing material samples and associated (meta)data are fragmented across institutional catalogs, practices for identification, and discipline-specific (meta)data standards. The Internet of Samples (iSamples) is a standards-based collaboration to uniquely, consistently, and conveniently identify material samples, record core metadata about them, and link them to other samples, data, and research products. iSamples extends existing resources and best practices in data stewardship to render a cross-domain cyberinfrastructure that enables transdisciplinary research, discovery, and reuse of material samples in 21st century natural science.

Research collections are an important tool for understanding the Earth, its systems, and human interaction. Despite the importance of collections, many are not maintained or curated as thoroughly as we would like. Part of the reason for this is the lack of professional reward for collection, curation, or maintenance. To address this gap in attribution metadata, the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) organization co-endorsed a Working Group to create recommendations for the representation of attribution metadata. After 18 months, this Working Group recommended the use of PROV entities and properties to link people (Agent), the curatorial actions they perform (Activity), and the digital or physical objects they are curating (Entity). Assigning a Role to an Agent is optional. These recommendations are discussed in the context of the RDA, TDWG, and existing standards. Future work includes adapting these recommendations to the specific needs of TDWG and developing a pilot application in collaboration with ORCID and the Data Futures project.

In the summer of 2008 all University of North Carolina libraries switched from a traditional library catalog interface supporting text-based searching (TextOnly) to a text and facet-based interface (TextFacet) to improve users' search experiences. This study seeks to understand the differences between these two interfaces and how they affect the search experience of the novice user. In this study, 40 participants were asked to search for resources using both interfaces. Their search times and accuracy were measured across three types of search tasks (known, partially known, and exploratory ). After completing the searches, they were asked a series of questions about their experiences. The data were analyzed in order to identify strengths and weaknesses in both search interfaces. Thirty-six out of 40 participants preferred the TextFacet interface to the TextOnly interface. Using three dependent variables-time, accuracy, and rating-the two interfaces were compared and interactions were tested with the three task types. Search times for the TextFacet were shorter and participants preferred the TextFacet search interface over the TextOnly search interface. Performances across the three task types were different in terms of search time. The partially known and exploratory task types showed similar distributions for rating and accuracy. These distributions were distinctly different from the known task type. The results of this study may assist libraries in developing improved library catalog search interfaces that utilize facets as well as text searching.