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Yesterday I attended the ASERL-Auburn Forum on Library User Services. As usual, I took copious notes and posted them to my blog. If you’re interested in reading more I’ll put the links at the bottom of this post. To keep it interesting, I’m posting the main points here.
There were four big take aways for me:
- Assessment is very important.
- User research will make our services/collection/building/web presence better.
- A little bit of time, invested early on, can save time later on.
- Successful programs at other places won’t necessarily be successful in every organization. Best to talk with users before implementing new things.
The day was packed (but not too rushed) with great presentations talking about everything from the practical to the more theoretical. We heard about trends in user services, usability testing and user studies on how students do research, we learned about how Rochester did their anthropological studies and how the University of Virginia built a culture of assessment, we heard about the fabulous work done at Georgia Tech that positioned them to win the 2007 Excellence in Academic Libraries Award and how statistics can be useful in evaluating services.
This was particularly good timing for me as I have been thinking more lately about usability and talking with users about their experience on the web side of things. This forum addressed the same issues in a much wider way. Interestingly, many people come to user studies/experience through web usability or space design. People see how useful studying these issues can be and then begin to apply the principles to a broader spectrum of library work.
It also became clear to me that in order to effectively implement broad scale user studies, a library would need some level of processes in place. User studies appear to happen largely before the prototyping phase, during development, and after implementation. Having clear stages of development makes it easier to incorporate user studies.
Now for the detailed notes:
This is the introduction to the day.
This really interesting talk focused on trends found in a recent study of research libraries. A fair amount of the talk was on instruction, which was particularly interesting to me in my instructional design role. He echoed much of what the ID world has been saying about blended learning, collaborative student work, facilitator teaching, etc. Good talk!
John Law, of ProQuest, gave this fantastic talk on a study of student research behaviors. It was an excellent study, from recruiting participants to meeting them where they were. He used some really excellent software as well. He had some interesting points about the different roles that Google and databases play in student research.
This talk described the work that Georgia Tech has done in their library and the way they incorporated user studies in their work. He talked about the space, marketing, and studies, and generally set us up for our tours of the space.
This talk was on the fabulous work done at Rochester. They’ve done some amazing work that I suspect would be fairly applicable here based on the similarities between our schools. Interesting stuff!
This panel included Joe Williams of NCSU, Erin Mayhood of University of Virginia, and Brian Mathews of Georgia Tech. Each instituition is doing really excellent work, and I wish we had more time to hear from each of these speakers.
It was a great forum. If you want to talk about user studies and services, just let me know!