I know Jenica wondered if her blog post, Rambling about possessiveness, really had a point, but it was right in line with things I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. Jenica wrote about the fine line between taking ownership of a project/thing in terms of really being really invested in the success or failure of a project vs. taking ownership in a possessive sense. This is something I’ve been wondering about too, especially as we’re working on a lot of projects that will, to some extent, change the way students use the library online. When I work on a project, I get very invested in it, because I feel a passion for my work and want to make things great. But I think sometimes that passion (for me, for anyone) can border on possessiveness, and when we get to that place, we can forget who we’re actually doing these things for in the first place.
For years, we’ve used our catalog basically as it came out of the box, but we now have an awesome new Systems Librarian and a Head of Digital Initiatives who are really passionate about making the catalog more usable. I couldn’t be more excited about this. The other day, we met to talk about library annual goals and my colleagues discussed their unit’s goal for improving the catalog. They talked about customizations we as librarians might like to see, but never did they talk about finding out what our users want or need from the catalog or finding out how our users use the catalog. And my colleague who heads this unit is a very user-focused person, but “surveying the population” was not something he was saying in terms of improving the catalog. So, I brought it up, because I worry about us developing something that’s great for librarians and is sucky for the people it’s really there for. A day later, another colleague emailed everyone with some questions about the test catalog and described his preferences for searches. While his questions were certainly valuable, I had to say to myself “who cares how you like to search?” Or how I like to search? Is that how our users like to search? Can we assume that we know that? Yes, include the search options that allow us to do our job, but the catalog should be customized in order to meet the needs of our students and faculty. I think we sometimes get this tunnel vision where we start to think that it’s about us. And it really shouldn’t be, because our library wouldn’t exist without the patrons we’re here to serve. As Jenica said, the libraries aren’t ours. Then neither is the catalog/website/etc.
But even when we do usability studies or surveys, I sometimes wonder if we don’t design them in such a way that we get the results we want to see in the first place. When I did usability testing of our website four years ago, the results brought us to the same conclusions I had come to myself just by looking at it. And I wonder if in some way my own biases impacted the design and results. Maybe, maybe not. But I often get the sense that we’re sometimes doing assessments not to learn something new, but to confirm what we already think we know or how we want things to be. How often are you really surprised by the results of a survey or usability study you’ve done?
I’m happy the students are coming back this week, because it brings us back to reality. It reminds us of why we’re here. We’re here to support the academic work of students and faculty — not to create the coolest tools that only we think are cool or the best catalog for librarians. We so often take for granted that we know what our users want and need or we assume that because an article in Educause says that students are like ___ then our students must be like ___ as well. We need to get, as our University President (a military man) often says, “the ground truth.” We need to build things our users truly want and need and leave our egos and possessiveness and desire to only create something really cool at the door (which so many of us, me included, are guilty of once in a while). Because it’s not about us. It’s about them.
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.
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.
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 🙂
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.
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.
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.
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.