Comments on: It’s not about us (or more ramblings on possessiveness)

By: Rachel O

Rachel O — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 08:21:28 +0000

As a technical person, I think often when we email our librarian team asking for their opinions, we don’t just mean “how would you like to search”, we mean “how do you think our users would like to search”. It may be laziness, but we rely on our subject librarians to be our link to the users.

By: Meredith Farkas

Meredith Farkas — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 13:29:07 +0000

Kate, I agree with you that our expertise means something and we can’t always blindly follow what our users want. As Henry Ford famously said “”If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” But, like Steve said, we have to remain focused on user needs while exercising our professional judgment. Sometimes, we do assume that our users think the way we do. One of my colleagues prefers left-anchored title searching to title keyword, and he really pushed to have that as the default title search option on the front page of our library website (which luckily did not happen). But he doesn’t see the students in instruction sessions who are so used to Google that they just want to put in random words they remember from a title (which would get a zero result in a left-anchored search). We have to have a basic understanding of user behavior and user needs to exercise our professional judgment in service of our users.

By: Steve Thomas

Steve Thomas — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 02:00:40 +0000

Good post, thank you. a few more points:

1. We as professionals *should* have a pretty good idea about how to improve our catalogue. So long as we remained focused on user needs.

2. Maybe surveys show the same things we thought of because the flaws in existing catalogue systems are blindingly obvious to all.

3. Sometimes its not so much about improving search results (and few customisations can fix that) as “enriching the user experience”, eg with Amazon book covers. Because in the world of Google, we desperately want the users to like us!

4. And yes, “use the stats, Luke”! We spent god-knows how many hours arguing about and tweaking search options, but the default keyword option is far and away the most used, while subject, series title and call number get virtually no use.

By: Kate W

Kate W — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 01:07:19 +0000

This is well put, but I think when designing things or creating new library programs or doing anything else with the library, you should consider that you are the professional. You may have ideas that your patrons will not have. They expect you to come up with new and interesting ways to serve them, and they expect that you will convince them to do new and interesting things. You should be asking what the patrons want, but also have an eye to what they don’t yet know they want, but might…or even what they need but didn’t realize. And while patrons may be users of your catalog, librarians certainly use it a lot and need it to be more complex as a tool than patrons do, so their needs are important as well.

If all we did was respond to what patrons said they wanted, we wouldn’t serve them very well. The library isn’t a democracy, it’s a service. Pay attention to your patrons’ needs, but have some respect for your knowledge as a professional practitioner, even in the absence of statistical data. Library Science is an art.

By: Jeff Scott

Jeff Scott — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 16:36:52 +0000

Most surveys and analysis have a level of bias in them, some outright. Surveys can be filled with loaded/leading questions or avoid questions about items that are off the table.

Surveys can be useful if you’re willing to use that information and be flexible enough to go forward. That will ensure better surveys.

I’m a bit more interested in usage. People can say what they want in a survey, but it’s what they do that sends the message. I remember doing surveys and the general public said that they used the non-fiction collection more than fiction. My stats said the opposite.

People vote with their library card

By: Genesis Hansen

Genesis Hansen — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 16:30:31 +0000

I definitely struggle with the possessiveness issue – most often when it’s time to take my hands off the wheel and let a colleague drive the next leg of the trip, but I also see the tendency in myself to assume that our customers want the same things I want.

I’ve been running a usability testing project at my library, and I added a couple of iterations to the process to try to combat exactly that. Our initial tests of our site confirmed my early suspicions about the problem areas of our site, and it was really hard not to take that as confirmation of my analysis and stop there. But I realized that a lot of the “success” users experienced on our site might just be coming from familiarity, so I also tested our site with non-users, and had our regular customers test other sites that are set up differently than ours. This is our first pass at usability testing and I know our process was not perfect, but we did identify a few more issues that way and it forced me and my team to look beyond our own biases and pay attention to what our customers are actually doing.

Thanks for the post – it’s good to take the focus off of ourselves and remember why we do what we do.

By: Kim Davies Hoffman

Kim Davies Hoffman — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:13:31 +0000

Thanks, Meredith, for stating this so clearly. During a sleepless night a few weeks ago, I wrote up my own blog post which addressed some of these same issues. A group of us must be thinking along the same lines these days. For whatever reason, I decided not to post the entry. One of the points I was trying to make, however, referred to a rush to new technologies that I see happening a lot lately, perhaps just because they’re new and we don’t want to “fall behind,” technologically speaking. But are these tools the BEST way to serve our students? Or are they, as you say, just something that librarians think are cool? Lately, I’ve been feeling like the curmudgeon librarian (and I’m certainly no technophobe) because I am constantly asking the questions about how new implementations will affect or best serve our students. Too many times, I feel like we just launch headlong into new technology without taking the time to consider the greater implications to our students. Just recently, we’ve seen that too much focus on getting services and products out quickly into the public eye without much reflection can be both costly and just plain confusing to students, especially when they don’t work as well as we had hoped. So, thank you for writing up this post. It validates a lot of what I’ve been thinking lately.