  As the Distributed Collection Manager's work on building tools to support
users maintaining collections of changing web-based resources has progressed,
questions about the characteristics of people's collections of web pages have
arisen. Simultaneously, work in the areas of social bookmarking, social news,
and subscription-based technologies have been taking the existence, usage, and
utility of this data for granted with neither investigation into what people
are doing with their collections nor how they are trying to maintain them. In
order to address these concerns, we performed an online user study of 125
individuals from a variety of online and offline communities, such as the
reddit social news user community and the graduate student body in our
department. From this study we were able to examine a user's needs for a system
to manage their web-based distributed collections, how their current tools
affect their ability to maintain their collections, and what the
characteristics of their current practices and problems in maintaining their
web-based collections were. We also present extensions and improvements being
made to the system both in order to adapt DCM for usage in the Ensemble project
and to meet the requirements found by our user study.
