I'm sorry not to have responded to your post about the CAA focus groups, but do have a few thoughts I hope you'll consider when you begin to put together the actual program.

1. I hope we will be able to work with groups of students, teachers, and administrators, and to try to discover if there is a significant difference between the groups in their reactions to the database, particulary in the navigation and search functions.

2. There did seem to be a lot of interest in questions of navigation and searching, which are of course very important. However, I am more interested in hearing, on a face-to-face basis, about users' reactions to the content we are providing: do all of the users understand that the library contains information beyond tombstone data and images? What kinds of rich content are most useful? Label copy? Additional views? Archaeological information? Bibliographical information? Etc. Is it more important for us to focus on the deep data or on providing more images? I hope that we can really push for sophisticated answers to these questions which will allow us to think, at the institutional level, about the rationale behind our content submissions.

3. I would be interested in understanding the PROCESS by which the educators are creating curriculum materials from the library, or might create such content; in the extent to which they have support to do so from their departments and from the institutions they work for; in the means by which they "publish" and document these materials; in the extent to which they are sharing the materials with their colleagues. Obviously, we will want to know what tools they would most like to have for the documentation and publication of their materials. Also: what other content resources do these educators use/need to flesh out the material found in the libraries and where are they going for these resources?

4. Likewise, I am interested in knowing whether the students themselves are likely to use the library as a stand-alone research tool outside of the context of prepared curriculum materials. If so, what is the threshold of critical mass needed for the tool to be really valuable for them?

That's MY top four anyway.

Susan Chun Metropolitan Museum of Art