Crowdsourcing HCI for the institutional repository

It is said that one must not judge a book by its cover, but does that extend to researchers and cover sheets? Cover sheets excite enough discussion for technical and policy reasons – impact on metadata, necessity of use, branding , impact on publishers and so forth – to relegate the questions of their usability and efficacity to the bottom of the pile. In this era of cutting costs and trimming budgets, who has the money to spend on detailed investigation of anything that does not immediately impact on the core functions of institutional repositories: encouraging deposits, repository upkeep and so forth? In this paper we demonstrate the use of a crowdsourcing platform to run an extensive between-subjects HCI experiment designed to explore the impact of cover sheets upon common user tasks such as identification of document elements such as publication date and location of publication, and evaluate user perceptions of document layout.