Conceptualizing institutional repositories: using co-discovery to uncover mental models

This study investigates how people construct mental models of new information systems with which they have limited experience. Six different institutional repositories were used as the experimental systems for this lab-based co-discovery experimental study. Sixty subjects (30 pairs) were asked to complete search tasks based on a simulated work situations using an institutional repository. Subsequently, subjects were instructed to visually depict how they thought the institutional repository worked and then explain this to their partner. Our findings are based on these drawings, descriptors written on drawings, and audio-recordings of explanations and conversations. The results reveal that most of the subjects constructed mental models focusing on system operations and the design of the user interface. Few highlighted the interactivity between the system and the end user or presented a global-view of the system to show how it related to other search engines or databases. We found that the co-discovery method provides a viable research design to elicit people's mental model construction. The implications of the results for interactive information retrieval community and institutional repository community are discussed in terms of research design, search behavior, and user instruction.