Hello Everyone,
I have been following your conversation for a while and would now like to
introduce myself and join in. My name is Susan Zeyher and I am a Fellow at
the National Institute for Science Education (NISE) located at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. Attached is an html file with a summary
and metadata structure I am developing for an education infonet project
here at NISE.
We encountered the same problems about different types of 'audience' that
you are discussing . We have found that the issue of ‘audience’ comes up
in the business and medical fields as well as education. They all have an
intermediary (manager or doctor/nurse or teacher) between the material and
the employee or patient or student. Instead of using the element
‘audience’ and then having to split it into two, we simply used two
elements, Customer and User.
The names for the two audiences came from the business world, Customer
(teacher) and User (student). I’m not completely satisfied with Customer
and User or Audience and Beneficiary. So far, I think I prefer
Intermediary and Beneficiary. What other possibilities can we find to call
these two types of audience? I’m concerned that they be as intuitive as
possible, so searchers, and those who apply the categories, can take full
advantage of the distinction. If the searchers and indexers have trouble
understanding it, then the usefulness of distinguishing the two types of
audience is decreased to zero.
We developed a single vocabulary to use for both Customer and User.
I really enjoy everyone's input to these discussions and look forward to
participating in them.
-Susan Zeyher-
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