This is just a quick note to say that Library DIY (which I wrote about in a previous post) has been released! I am so very proud of this project.
This research tool is still very much in beta, so please feel free to share with me any feedback you might have.
Congratulations to you and your colleagues at Portland State! I’ve been waiting for the launch of this ever since you first wrote about it. I love the look of the site and suspect that your students will find it a nice entree into answers to their FAQs. In your first post about this, you mentioned the obvious need to make this project as visible as possible. Beyond spotlighting it on the library’s website, what other approaches to advertising it have you come up with?
I was also wondering if you’ve done usability testing of the site. It would be really interesting to hear about feedback you’re getting from students about this project.
Can’t wait to hear more!
Thanks Stephen! I’m excited to see what the response from our students will be (librarian enthusiasm is lovely, but we are rarely much like our students). We’re still working the marketing out, as classes haven’t yet started.
Beyond being on the appropriate pages on the website, I’m hoping we can get it on our rotating features on the bottom right of our home page. I’ve created a LibGuides box and encouraged my colleagues to put it on all of their guides. I crafted blurbs for our blog/Facebook and for marketing it to faculty in our liaison communications. Those of us teaching first-year students plan to show it when we teach and hopefully others will as well. I’m still brainstorming more marketing ideas (maybe flyers in departmental offices? on our digital library signage? etc.).
We were working with our web content strategist to do usability testing this summer, but my boss asked us to put it on hold until after we launched it so we could focus on responding to feedback from our colleagues this summer. We had the tasks and questions ready to go, but we plan to pick it up again right after the Fall instruction onslaught.
This is really great! A professor just walked by as I was looking at the webpage and I had to pull her aside and show her. She thought it would be great for students and maybe even for her. I would love something like this at my library!
That is so kind of you to say, Jared! I’m hoping we’ll be able to release this so that other libraries can easily replicate it.
Meredith, I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: I love Library DIY. I think the part I like the best is that it breaks apart the interconnected things we librarians like to cram together into a single guide, which I think will appeal to students. I especially like the use of screenshots when showing instead of telling makes more sense.
I would really like to do something like this, and while we just implemented LibAnswers, this format makes more intuitive sense to me as a user than the knowledge base kind of system. If you do release this for adaption, I’d love to find a way to link those things together–maybe by finding common questions from LibAnswers to use as potential modules in the DIY, and link DIY modules to the knowledge base. I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled!
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Thank you so much Kaijsa! I can totally see using DIY as the front end for LibAnswers (sort of like a discovery layer!). I’ll definitely let you know when I know for sure if we can release the source code (I’m thinking it shouldn’t be a problem, but it has to wend its way through the layers of bureaucracy).
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