Use and Users

"To be a cupcakist is to put your faith in the church of cute and sweet, to believe that childhood is a magical land accessible via a palm-size serving of sugar and fat (and the occasional sprinkle)." -Jennie Yabroff

SWEETS supports Cupcakes Galore!, which is a physical and digital library of cupcake cookbooks and blogs. We have three types of users for this compilation; those affiliated with SWEETS as a culinary institution, the general public, and cultural scholars. Faculty, staff, and students of SWEETS will use the collection for their gastronomic education. The public will be interested in viewing Cupcakes Galore! to fulfill their cupcake needs, including baking. We also envision the collection to be utilized by popular culture scholars, not affiliated with SWEETS, who are interested in the cupcake phenomena in the United States.

There will be two authorization levels for the digital library that allow access to Cupcakes Galore! The two permission tiers are for SWEETS members, and for the public. The faculty, students, and staff of SWEETS will have full access to all the materials in the digital library, including: articles and blogs. On the other hand, the public collection will be limited to viewing a narrower scope of the digital holdings. The reasoning behind these two layers is to allocate all of the resources to SWEETS; as most academic library holdings are devoted to their students and staff. The physical holdings of the library, which includes the extensive book collection, will be available for the public to view on-site. The public will receive a taste of Cupcakes Galore! that will enable them to use the site to fulfill their cupcake needs.

We, Cupcakes Galore!, will be organized via Zipf’s principle of least effort. Zipf states that individuals seek out information using the least amount of effort. Arranging our collection with this assumption allows us to classify our library in an intuitive and easy to use assembly of works that requires minimal effort from the user to locate items. Cupcakes Galore! will also encourage browsing, which can lead viewers to unintentional discovery of resources. Browsing will be supported by hyper-linking and indexing.

SWEETS is a culinary school, and Cupcakes Galore! will provide information for both the pastry specialist, and the general chef. We at Cupcakes Galore! will create a collection for both of these types of students, because it encourages users to peruse the library, and to delve deeply into the subject. The collection is also a resource for faculty. Faculty can use the full collection to develop lesson plans, further their research in baking techniques, and to stimulate their own cupcake creativity.

We at Cupcakes Galore! foresee the viewing public to be composed of a variety of age groups, with a range of baking abilities. The public using Cupcakes Galore! is presumed to come from a variety of baking backgrounds, from the home baker to the cupcake aficionado. The users will utilize the digital library for finding specific recipes, browsing recipes, reading blogs, and viewing cupcake images. We also envision bakeries using the site, from upscale and gourmet cupcake bakeries to general bakeries. Cupcakes are now an alternative to traditional wedding cakes, and we expect bakeries specializing in wedding cakes to view the site, as well as individuals planning to use cupcakes at their special events. Cupcakes Galore! is not limited to a specific age group, thus children and adults can use the site.

Scholars will use Cupcakes Galore! for their popular cultural studies of food, and they will employ the site to study, what Daniel Gross calls, "the cupcake bubble." We here at Cupcakes Galore! are a pioneer in collecting cupcake cookbooks, and for this reason we are a necessary site for anthropological studies of food and culture in relation to cupcakes. We are a useful introduction to the cupcake craze, and will allow scholars to explore references of cupcake cookbooks for further research.

Research Methods/Evaluation

SWEETS is committed to providing our students with digital library teaching sessions to fully educate our students and staff of the capabilities of Cupcakes Galore! We want to equip our users with the necessary tools to find the cupcake resources they seek. In order to evaluate our effectiveness in providing our users with an easy to use interface we will conduct an evaluate analysis.

The users of Cupcake Galore! are the students and faculty of SWEETS, the public, and popular culture scholars. To fully understand the information-seeking habits of our users we will conduct focus groups, surveys, in-person and phone interviews, and usability testing. Cupcakes Galore! is a successful digital library if it assists its users in locating and retrieving the information they require. An ongoing assessment of our users’ behavior and needs will keep Cupcakes Galore! current on our clients' wishes.

Resources

"Cupcakes." foodtimeline.org. The Food Timeline, n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2009.

Musser, George. "Cupcakes." Scientific American, Sept. 2009: 98. Print.

O'Brien, Heather, L. and Sonya Symons. "The Information Behaviors and Preferences of Undergraduate Students." Research Strategies 20 (2007): 409-423. Print.

Williams, Sarah C. "The Sampler Platter: An Introduction to Nine Agricultural and Food Digital Projects." Journal of Agricultural & Food Information 8.4 (2007): 75-82. Print.

Wilson, Tom. "The Information User: Past, Present and Future." Journal of Information Science 34.4 (2008): 457-464. Print.

Yabroff, Jenny. "Let Them Eat Cupcakes." Newsweek, 24 Sept. 2009. Web. 20 Nov. 2009.