ARLG: Communicating with our users.

Yesterday marked my first CILIP event as I attended the course "Communicating with our Users" as a delegate. The speakers were Angela Cutts and Emma-Jane Batchelor (Faculty of Education), Cambridge, Jane Helgesen (UEA), and Libby Tilley filling in for a poorly Georgina Cronin (from the English Faculty Library and the Cambridge Judge Business School libraries respectively), while the delegates represented a range of libraries from places like Norwich, Cambridge, Nottingham, Hertfordshire and Hull.

As a thoughtful and caring group of librarians, the delegates had little trouble answering the prompt, "Why communicate?" Reasons cited included understanding our users, building relationships, breaking down barriers and being able to better tailor our services. Of course there are ways in which communication benefits us in terms of marketing library services, busting myths about who we are and what we do and even simply informing people that we exist. But communication is very much a two-way street with benefits for everyone if it is done effectively.

Done poorly, communication is effort down the drain. Photo by Lucy Welch.

A quick exercise listing ways in which libraries can engage in real-time vs. any-time communication revealed the vast number of ways we try to communicate with users, but equally (if not more) significant are the ways in which we unconsciously communicate. We were asked to put ourselves in our users' shoes and imagine what is communicated to our users unconsciously when they step inside our libraries. Those libraries with grand atriums devoid of books and comforts might look imposing, institutional, or more like a hotel than a library. My library is much smaller but on walking in there are no clear directional signs and staff are practically hidden behind a ridiculously tall desk that my shorter colleagues struggle to even see over the top of. I have always felt that this physical barrier forms part of a larger psychological barrier between us and our students that keeps us from communicating.

The issue of formality vs. informality was discussed quite a bit and forms another unconscious method of communication. Whether you address users in emails with "Hi, ______" or "Dear _______", whether you wear jeans and trainers to work or have a business-like dress code or wear sparkly lanyards, whether your Tweets sound funny and human or like they were generated by a computer, these things can set the tone for communication and are very dependent on the user base at your library. Emma and Angela work with many professional teachers and as such they feel more formal communication is needed, whereas Libby is on first name, "Hi, ______" terms with her predominantly undergraduate student base. And while Emma and Angela have developed the implict dress code of "dress like a teacher", Andy Priestner and his staff at the CJBS library "embrace the informal" and dress in the same sort of jeans, trainers and other comfortable clothes that their users wear. It may seem of little significance but clothing, tone and other subtle ways in which we portray ourselves communicate huge amounts. It's not only what we say but how we say it that either breaks down or puts up barriers.

The only time I wear jeans to work is on Saturdays.

This gave me a lot of food for thought. In my four years in my current job I have only ever worn jeans to work on Saturdays (as in the photo above). I'm not overly formal, given that the orange converse, my Doc Martens with a hole in the toe and my brogues, which are in an advanced state of decay, have all made regular appearances at work. But I had always wanted to be recognizable as a professional, both because I look close enough in age to the students to often be mistaken for a student rather than a professional librarian and because I felt that if I dressed formally it would help communicate to students that librarians had more to offer than just stamping books. Also, it would not feel entirely right to supervise visiting readers at the Wren Desk wearing shorts and a t-shirt while many of them wear shirts and ties for the occasion. However, I will have to give serious thought to the discussions we had yesterday and the article I posted above. As Andy said, "Clothes don’t make you professional." Would it help break down the barriers between staff and students if I wore jeans to work during the week? Do the trousers, shirts and blazers instill a sense of confidence in students that I am a responsible adult who is capable of helping them? I don't know. As all of the speakers said, communication should be tailored to the user group based on understanding and in those terms I'm only just getting to know who our users are.

The main thing is to be strategic about communication. We brainstormed words that apply to communication for each letter of the SMART objectives acronym and it turns out that librarians are rather good at coming up with synonyms:

@ARLGEastern Your SMART objectives for library communication. Thanks for all your ideas #arlgcomms pic.twitter.com/5GGITcrXkw

— Angela Cutts (@AngelEdLib) May 8, 2015

Putting thought into all of these aspects and tailoring them to your users will maximize the impact of communication meaning that your time is being well spent. Angela and Emma went on to look at specific examples of how they used multiple channels to communicate on a single aspect of the service. Their fun, engaging efforts were carefully timed, tailored to their users and were very eye-catching, but they always had a purpose behind them. Their "Will you be my borrower?" display for Valentine's Day, for example, generated crowd-sourced book recommendations. While they had fun making art-and-crafty DIY displays, the thought behind their outreach was methodical and I was impressed and inspired by how interconnected their displays, social media output and in-house events were. There was always a reason or a catch behind all the fun. It was always communicating something about the library's services but doing the double duty of helping users see the library staff as approachable and human.

I won't go into the excellent and exemplary case study presented by Jane Helgesen about communication with users during a project to redesign a space in the library. Suffice it to say that it provided me with many ideas about how we might approach a major redesign of the library if it ever comes to that. The main point I want to bring up from her talk was the importance of staff buy-in for effective communication. Faced with the difficult task of getting students excited about the library re-development (rather than irritated by the disruption to their studies), Jane ensured that everyone on the library's staff were well informed so they could give consistent, on-message information to students. Staff needed to be "clear and confident about what was going on," and their enthusiasm for the project could then spread to the library users. This was achieved through regular meetings, emails, and a shared folder that was regularly updated to keep staff in the loop and feeling empowered. It was a great example of how good communication is a holistic way of approaching libraries, not just a marketing tool to be exploited.

Communication is about understanding, give and take and being serious about not taking yourself too seriously.

You can get some different perspectives on what was discussed from the excellent live Tweeters by reading through #arlgcomms on Twitter. It was a great day, topped off with a tour of the Dawson Books warehouse, where Lucy and I, bedecked in hi-viz vests, came over all geeky about conveyor belts, industrial scale book shelves and a very satisfying machine that folds cardboard boxes. Thanks to the ARLG and the organizers of this event for a really nice day!

Lucy and I take a hi-viz selfie in the Dawson Books warehouse.

UX Studies 1 - Lessons learned from the Feedback Wall (that don't have much to do with feedback)

The Feedback Wall at my library has been ongoing since mid-February and was inspired by this post on the UKAnthroLib blog. I'll admit that my secret hope when putting it together was that we would get positive feedback in among the mixture of suggestions and criticisms, the way other libraries seemed to be getting. In hindsight, I know that was a lot to ask given the relationship we currently have with our students, and our feedback so far has been entirely criticism and suggestions. While it has occasionally been a bit wounding to the ego, a lot of good has come out of the Feedback Wall and we intend to keep it going. Hopefully we'll get to the point where we do start to get positive reinforcement from students, but I certainly know now not to expect it.

Along those lines, I wanted to share a few lessons I have learned during this process that have less to do with the comments people have left and more with the process of soliciting feedback in this way and about workplace culture.

1- You can provide all the bells and whistles you want as long as you also address the most pressing needs.

I had been feeling pretty good about the Feedback Wall. In response to feedback we've received in the last three months we've brought in pens for next to the catalogue computers, sped up the acquisitions process for recommended books, purchased USB DVD drives and book rests for students to borrow, acquired ear plugs to give out to students and relaxed our drinks rules to allow students to finish hot drinks in the Issue Desk area rather than outside the library.

However, one issue keeps coming up consistently: the students want a water cooler or drinking fountain in the library. It is our most common suggestion/complaint on the feedback wall and was one of the most common comments on our user survey last year. No matter what else we were doing, this issue came up again and again and, while I sympathise very much with the student perspective, there was reluctance from higher up to do anything about it. I feel certain it will keep coming up until we do take some kind of action. It has been an excellent lesson in the fact that even if you think your institution is being reasonable (i.e. bring in your own water bottler), the users do not necessarily agree, and it is important to address those concerns.

2 - No matter how hard you work, people will still find something to critique you on. There's a balance to strike between trying to meet every single need and not bothering.

As a library assistant I work very hard to make the library a positive place for students to work. I am one of their main human points of contact with the library and as such I am very invested in making sure they have a good experience. However, I am also in the position of enforcing rules and, as the person who keeps track of the Feedback Wall, representing the views and expectations of my institution to students. This is a very difficult position to negotiate, especially when your sympathies and the policies you are enforcing do not align.

Even if you could somehow meet every need thanks to an inexhaustible budget, incredibly flexible library space and a staff entirely comprised of the sort of service-minded, bend-over-backwards librarians we wish we could be, there will always be something that someone thinks you've done wrong or could improve on. If you're in a more flawed (i.e. real) library, there are lots of somethings users will pick up on. This can become overwhelming if you let it. Or, you can take things on as you have the capacity to deal with them, one step at a time. Like I talked about in my previous post, keeping your focus on the final goal of a perfect library is unattainable and will ultimately lead you to burn out. Do what you can, when you can. If you are smart about it, you can potentially have a big impact without wearing yourself out.

3 - Learn to not take criticism of your institution personally.

Most of the feedback has been constructive or at least polite, but there have been a few that have really gotten under my skin and made me feel truly awful. The worst actually cropped up this week and was about - you guessed it - water. Not only did the student feel that we were expecting people to "drink from the sinks like dogs" but wondered how long the library was going to "ignore" the issue. This hurt, particularly because I had been trying for months to find new angles and new approaches to get management to solve this issue. Even if it was not being resolved, it was certainly not being ignored.

That was a moment when I needed to step back and put myself in the shoes of the individual who wrote the comment. From their perspective, it must have felt like we were ignoring the issue. If students see that nothing is being accomplished, they assume that means that nothing is being done. It wasn't a personal critique, just an expression of frustration at what to the students must seem like a no-brainer issue because we haven't been able to adequately justify the library's position.


I think empathy is the key to negotiating these difficult situations. If you can simultaneously empathise with both parties and truly understand their perspectives, it makes creative problem-solving and negotiation much easier. The moment you let yourself get worked up and feel personally affronted, you shut down your ability to approach the problem from different angles because now you are simply approaching it from a defensive position rather than one based on understanding.

4 - If you really believe in something, don't give up arguing for it. Keep changing your approach until you can reach a compromise.

Everyone's heard the phrase "You have to pick your battles", right? I kind of have a love/hate relationship with that phrase. It's useful in as much as it can remind you about the finite energy, finite resources or finite flexibility you have to work with, as in my previous points. But when it comes to dealing with people, this phrase makes me very frustrated. "You have to pick your battles with ________, you know?"

To my mind this just excuses the other person from having to make compromises. I'm certainly not saying I want to be adversarial over every single issue. Indeed, the most effective approaches involve seeing the issue from the other person's point of view and addressing their concerns in a creative and civil way. But I don't think that you should let "picking your battles" excuse anyone from having to engage in conversation over your difference of opinion on important issues. Nor should you let it excuse you from having a conversation that you're nervous about having. If you truly believe in something, keep trying different angles, different approaches, different solutions.

Somewhere in the depths of the UXLibs hashtag on Twitter I saw a quote from a keynote address (I'm really sorry, I don't remember which one or whose tweet it was) about approaching service design using the same rules as improvisational acting. In improv, there's the idea of "Yes, and..." This is where actors doing a scene together always build on what was said before. They never shut each other down by contradicting the inventions of their fellow actors, and they keep the scene going by expanding and elaborating on what has just been said, no matter how off-the-wall it may be. There was the idea at the UX Libs conference that this kind of environment is ideal for design because it keeps creative momentum going. Maybe some of the ideas will be impossible or undesirable in the end, but as part of the creative process it's important to run with them anyway because what sounds like a mad idea may end up being the brilliant solution you've been looking for.

If you are lucky enough to work in a "Yes, and..." environment, it's likely that you have a lot of scope to innovate. If you work in a "No, but..." environment, chances are you find it difficult to stay positive and keep coming up with new ideas. I know that I can get very emotionally exhausted by keeping my own momentum going while being told why my ideas won't work, why things won't change and so on. I'm not saying that you should ignore your own emotional well-being and plug away at things until you feel like you're going to drop, but don't let yourself get discouraged on the issues you really believe in. In that sense, you really should pick your battles - make sure you're investing emotional energy in things proportional to how important you think they are. But it's worth remembering that there are multiple approaches to every problem and it would be a shame to give up before you find one that works.

5 - Don't pay for supplies for your research out of your own pocket.

This one doesn't need much clarification. If you're doing UX research for your library, you're doing it for them. If you pay for your own supplies you'll end up feeling like an idiot later on, believe me.

Right Livelihood: Becoming a Buddhist Librarian

“Hour by hour resolve firmly to do what comes to hand with dignity, and with humanity, independence, and justice. Allow your mind freedom from all other considerations. This you can do, if you will approach each action as though it were your last, dismissing the desire to create an impression, the admiration of self, the discontent with your lot." 

- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Source: www.tibetanbuddhistaltar.org

I've had a hectic week at work this week what with stressed out students facing their exams, dissertations due, events in the library and lots of smaller projects needing tending. Fortunately, that has propelled me back to my meditative practice, which had tailed off a bit of late. Facing stresses I have faced before with a relatively new set of skills and attitudes has prompted me to think a lot about how my exploration of Buddhism has shaped my approach to my profession over the last year.

The title of this post, "Right Livelihood", derives from one of the core tenets of Buddhism, the Noble Eightfold Path, in which the Buddha prescribed the way to the end of suffering. "Suffering", incidentally, is the most common translation of the Pali word dukkha, but it is not as extreme as we tend to mean it. For instance, I've also seen dukkha translated as "unsatisfactoriness". It refers to that feeling most of us have that something is missing, something could be better, or that we're falling short in some way -  a pervading dissatisfaction with the way our lives are right now that drives us to work harder, to acquire more stuff or to escape from it all. The Noble Eightfold path is a way of being in the world that works to root out the desires and aversions that drive dukkha, and it has echoes in Epicureanism, Stoicism and many other philosophical and religious practices the world over.

The Noble Eightfold Path is both less of a super-human undertaking than it looks and profoundly more difficult than it seems. It is not a set of commandments for how you must be all the time lest you face some divine retribution, nor is it something to which you can simply pay lip service. Walpola Rahula, a Sri Lankan monk and author, wrote that the facets of the Eightfold Path "are to be developed more or less simultaneously, as far as possible according to the capacity of each individual. They are all linked together and each helps the cultivation of the others." [The emphasis is mine.] Right livelihood (which can also be translated as "skilful" or "wise" livelihood), like all of the facets of the Eightfold Path, is not clearly and explicitly defined. Generally speaking it is any undertaking that does good rather than harm, which is ethical according to a Buddhist framework (in general Buddhism does not condone killing, lying, slavery or dealing in intoxicants) and which supports rather than hinders the individual's spiritual practice. However, it is up to the circumstances, the capacity and the judgment of the individual what right livelihood looks like in their own lives.

The Noble Eightfold Path. Source: beliefnet.com

Even with such a broad definition, right livelihood seems to generate anxiety in a lot of modern, especially Western Buddhists. Ted Meissner of the Secular Buddhist podcast has joked that many people seem to think the only right livelihoods available to Buddhists are along the lines of yoga teacher, monk or aquaponic kale farmer. I certainly struggled with this when I first encountered right livelihood, becoming deeply uncomfortable with the feeling that I was reinforcing a system of privilege through my own complicity. Ajahn Brahm observes, however, that, "It's not what you do but how you do it that makes all the difference."

This is the point at which the entire system of the Eightfold Path begins to work together: the "how you do it" point. What Buddhism is teaching me is greater mindfulness of the present moment, detached from old scars and prejudices picked up in the past, removed from perceptions of the future. With greater attentiveness comes greater patience and compassion. This can only be accomplished through good intention and effort. It is the quality of your work that matters, even if you are washing a dish or reshelving a book. If you are doing something with your mind wandering elsewhere, how well are you actually doing that thing? Right livelihood, then, is not connected to one's job title so much as putting one's entire self into one's work, whatever that work happens to be.

The "how you do it" also includes your relationships to other people; to your co-workers and library users. Think about a time when someone in a customer service role smiled at you or went out of their way to be helpful when you were having a bad day. That one small interaction cost them nothing but it improved your day dramatically. Think of all the people you smiled at or helped in your job today. Even if they didn't see you, even if they never know what you did, did you catalogue something in a way that will help a library user find it? Did you make sure the shelves were organised so they could retrieve it quickly? You form part of a service made up of people for the benefit of people. You facilitate the creation of knowledge, the spark of discovery and the joyous, frightening, silly, satisfying experiences of library users. Did you do it well and wisely? Did you bring compassion to your library's services? In terms of my fears that I was reinforcing privilege through my work, I think that unjust systems cannot be changed by turning our backs on them. If I bring compassion to the corner of the world I inhabit, to every person I meet and to the people I will never meet who use my library's services, I think that's all anyone is called on to do in order to make the world a better place. 

The most difficult part of mindfulness for me has been cultivating better self-awareness, including an awareness of my own flaws. It can be very uncomfortable to look at your professional and personal shortcomings, but it is ultimately an incredibly useful exercise. Not only can you learn to work through them or at least to work around them, but if you can look with compassion at the parts of yourself that you dislike the most you can certainly treat others with the same degree of compassion. Acknowledging my own egocentrism and my need for recognition was the most important step toward letting it go. Obviously it's still a work in progress but the minute I stopped shying away from it I was able to shift my perspective on my work and what I wanted to get out of it. It isn't about self-abnegation so much as the recognition that "myself" is no more than a useful construct for interacting with the world that can be let go.

"The beginner's mind is the mind of compassion.When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless." - Shunryu Suzuki

Beginner's mind, or "don't-know mind" is an important approach to life in Buddhism, especially in the various Zen traditions, that is very connected to the idea of letting go of self. Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki said, "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few." As librarians we often need to market ourselves as experts in particular skills and competences in order to more effectively integrate our services into the teaching activities at our institutions. But while it is important to showcase our professional expertise, it is equally important to cultivate in our own minds a sense of curiosity and openness. Kristen Mastel and Genevieve Innes, two librarians writing about Mindfulness for librarians, argue:

"The benefit of a beginner’s mind, if one can cultivate and achieve it, is that one will then look at the world with fresh eyes, and can rediscover the joy of learning something new, of finding just the right article or book, the deep satisfaction of having a question or curiosity answered, a curiosity sated--experiences which excited one and first drew him into the profession. In beginner’s mind, we understand what it is like to be in new situation, to feel uncertain, to feel vulnerable. In the beginner’s mind, one realizes how important it is to demonstrate patience and understanding with ourselves and others."

Beginner's mind, then, is important to cultivating compassion for our users as well as finding joy in our careers. It can be frightening for information professionals to embrace something like "don't-know mind", but I think that if we are to develop a partnership with library users rather than an expert/novice or gatekeeper/seeker relationship it is important that we learn how not to be experts, to learn how to not know. Our users are the true experts on their needs and goals and approaching them with an open mind ensures that we have the best chance of understanding them.

Source: http://www.buddhistelibrary.org

In a previous post, reflecting on where I am at professionally, I mentioned a shift in focus from self-oriented goals to service-oriented goals. I said that I was no longer focusing on where I wanted to be in my career but what I wanted the library to be like. While searching for other librarians' musings on right livelihood I came across a wonderful article by a recently qualified librarian that I think sums it up perfectly: 

We new librarians need not be enlightened Buddhists to learn something from these teachings about the connection between ego and burnout. We bring high ideals to our work, as we should, but are doomed to burnout if we tie our egos to achieving those goals. We are never going to teach all of our patrons to be critical about their information sources. We will never have the funding to provide all of the information sources our patrons need. We will never convince all of our leaders that information needs to be free. Certainly, we can make progress toward these goals, perhaps tremendous progress, but there will always be more new technologies to master, more information to organize, more information needs to meet. Perhaps we will be able to face this constant onslaught without burnout if our goal is service, not personal accomplishment. - Roberta M. Richards

This resonated with me very profoundly. I was heading for just such a burnout when I began engaging with Buddhism because my ego was tied to goals. I was clinging to what I thought I ought to be, what my library ought to be, and that neither of us were there was a sign of deep personal failure. But the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step (so says Lao-tzu). There's a Zen proverb I really like that goes as follows:

A young but earnest Zen student approached his teacher and asked the Master, "If I work very hard and diligently, how long will it take for me to find Zen?"
The Master thought about this, then replied, "Ten years."
The student then said, "But what if I work very, very hard and really apply myself to learn fast. How long then?"
Replied the Master, "Well, twenty years."
"But, if I really, really work at it, how long then?" asked the student.
"Thirty years," replied the Master.
"But, I do not understand," said the disappointed student, "Each time that I say I will work harder, you say it will take me longer. Why do you say that?"
Replied the Master, "When you have one eye on the goal, you only have one eye on the path." 

In all of our lives there is work that is right in front of us. It's probably not glamorous or prestigious. We may not earn any recognition or praise for it. But it's there and waiting for our attention. This also means knowing when to set your professional work aside because the work that is in front of you is the crucial work of self-care, of getting enough sleep, of spending time with your friends or hobbies. Right livelihood to me is about doing the work that is in front of you, as Marcus Aurelius said, with humanity, with compassion and with energy. That is where I have found happiness and satisfaction in my work: doing what is in my capacity to do, giving everything I have in that moment, with compassion for myself and others.

And, fortunately, the work is never finished.

I know that this is not everyone's cup of tea so I thank you for bearing with me if you've read this entire post. I hope it's given you something to think about. None of the things I have discussed is really inherently or exclusively Buddhist: they're ideas that can be explored by people of any - or no - belief system. That I am engaging with them through Buddhism is merely a reflection of my own personal resonances and proclivities, but it has been through dedicated engagement with these ideas that I am at the point I am now: both having travelled a great distance and having so much more ground to cover.

UX study for a large college library

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am working on a series of UX studies over the coming months to gain a better picture of the experience of users of our library's services. I didn't want to cast the net too wide, because there is ongoing research by others on the experience of students using all of the libraries available to them, how libraries fit into their working lives etc. Also the final result of these studies will be a report that I will present to the Librarian of this college library with my recommendations for what we might do to improve user experience, so while a broader view will come into it, the focus of the study is on this library in particular.

Since there was some interest in what I've come up with, I'm posting a condensed version of the study design here and I will hopefully have the opportunity to do periodic updates on the results.

The core areas of investigation:

1)    What emotional relationships do users have to the college library?

2)    Where are we best at meeting needs/wants? Where are we failing?

3)    What insights can we gain into our role in students' academic lives?

4)    What goes on in the library?

5)    How do people relate to the spaces/services in the library?

Study 1: Feedback Wall

Based on the Speaking Wall introduced by Andy Priestner on the UKAnthroLib blog, the first phase of the study is a feedback wall in the library. This is already in place and has been ongoing since early February. I have been tracking the responses and while there have been quite a few issues that we could not resolve immediately (lack of water fountain, temperature, etc.) we have introduced quite a few new things to the library as a result, including new hand dryer for the male loos, pens on chains for the catalogue computers and we have ordered external DVD drives that will be borrowable by people whose laptops or tablets cannot play DVDs or CDs, since we have a large collection of both.

Anecdotally, I have noticed a slight increase in the number of people approaching the desk with queries since introducing the feedback wall and potentially they are approaching in a more open and friendly way (though it could be that my tyrannical campaign of saying hello to everyone who comes into the library is finally paying dividends).

Study 2: Issue Desk query tracking

On a sheet of paper, staff at the issue desk will put a tally mark under the most suitable category each time they are approached with a query. The categories are: Basic directional, Borrowing queries, Requesting supplies, Technology queries, Help finding a resource, Procedural and Other, with a blank space for noting down, if time allows, the specific query.

This study is primarily to supplement the others. I think it would be interesting to know what people are coming to a member of staff for in order to highlight what points of friction for which they are not coming to a member of staff. I wanted something really simple that would not be time-consuming for the front-line staff and the Cambridge University Library does something similar on an annual basis. I thought it would dovetail nicely with the rest of the studies.

Study 3: Student survey

Last year was the first year the library made any formal attempt to gather user feedback, which we did using a survey sent out to the entire student body. We had very good response thanks to offering an incentive for one person to be drawn at random (£25 Amazon voucher). The results were very interesting and led to a lot of small but cumulatively significant changes in the library for this academic year. This year we intend to do the same, but I am tailoring some of the questions toward specific things we want to know, like how many people know about various services we offer, how people would want to use the library if we had 24 hour opening and how they feel about non-borrowable duplicates of popular texts.

The advantage of surveys is their ability to get data from a large and broad sample of people. However, we learned last year that too many open-ended questions of that many people gives a muddy picture. In the end I spent hours and hours coding written responses in order to help them fit in with the quantitative data I was presenting. I did use specific responses to highlight the issues raised, but that data lacked depth. Therefore, I've kept open-ended questions to a minimum, though I did still want to give people the chance to leave written feedback if they did not feel comfortable using the feedback wall. The survey will be emailed to students near the end of Easter Term and once again an incentive will be offered, to be drawn at random.

Study 4: Behavioural mapping

This study comes from the lady herself, Georgina Cronin, UX Librarian at CJBS. Over the course of a couple of weeks she sat for hour long shifts in the library and observed 1) where people went, 2) what they were doing, and 3) how long they did it for. She mapped this information onto a plan of the library and created both a heat map and a coded map of different activities in the library.

This is going to be more challenging to do in my library as it is difficult to see multiple parts of the library at once. I may have to break it down into specific areas. However, I think it's worth doing because the library is not overlooked by staff so we don't really have any idea about behaviour in the library. At the very least I would like to make a heat map of where people sit most often and whether they are studying individually or working as groups, even if I'm unable to map activity and continuous flow through the library. This could give us an idea about where the most desirable seats are, how much the library is used for browsing, reading, writing and other activities respectively and whether any areas are conducive to group work.

One of the main challenges here is being unobtrusive. There is very much the feeling that the reading rooms are student spaces, such that when staff do walk through we draw a lot of attention. As a recognisable member of staff, will I be creating a distraction and/or changing the way people behave in the library? I'm still undecided about whether I want to try to do this by walk-through or by sitting in the library for long stretches as Georgina did. This might have to be a study that evolves as I learn what works in the space and what doesn't.

Study 5: Photo diary study

This is the study about which I'm most excited. It was mentioned in Georgina and Meg's class and was developed from Foster et al., though I have seen it in a few places, each time in a slightly different form. I plan to recruit about 5-8 students to photograph pre-made signs in locations they think fit the content of the signs. Several of them have blanks to fill in, so students can express frustration, boredom, annoyance, positivity, affection, and so on. The signs read:

I ____________________ THIS PLACE IN THE LIBRARY BECAUSE 

 

I _____________________ STUDYING/ WORKING HERE BECAUSE

WHEN I NEED A BREAK FROM WORK I COME HERE

WHEN I AM WORKING THIS IS PRETTY MUCH ALWAYS NEARBY

EVERY TIME I USE THIS I FEEL ________________________

THIS IS SOMETHING I WOULD SHOW A FIRST YEAR IN A TOUR OF THE LIBRARY BECAUSE

I will encourage participants to use as many or as few of them as they would like and to be as creative as they would like, taking photos within and outside the library with their own devices. As this is a more labour-intensive study for participants, each one will receive a gift card but will also be told that they have the right to leave the study at any point and dictate how their photographs are used. After the photographs are returned to me I will have a short interview with each participant to discuss what they chose and why. 

I'm hoping that because I am in contact with the Student Union president, who is very enthusiastic about working with the library to make improvements, recruitment will be a bit easier. I really look forward to seeing what people come up with on this, though.

Study 6: Storytelling/Open-ended interview

This study will be the last one I do so that I have time to build my own confidence and look at gaps in our understanding of our users. It is the most purely qualitative and the one for which I can do the least planning. Ideally, I would like the interviews to be a kind of conversation shaped by the interviewee, focused on their experience of using the library. This will hopefully generate very in depth information about how individuals relate to the library, problems they've had that we haven't found out about, how the feel about the space and the experience and so on.

Feedback spectrum: The types of feedback I expect to be generated by each study.

As you can seen from the chart above I have placed each of these studies on a spectrum based on what sort of feedback I would expect to be generated from each study. I did this to ensure that I was not looking solely at one type of data, nor at one aspect of the library experience but that I am building a relatively broad picture of library users.

The horizontal axis is adapted from the AEIOU framework discussed at the UXLibs conference and is also somewhat based on the discussion of the difference between tasks and goals in libraries. Tasks are finite and explicit, while goals are more implicit and harder to design for, but a successful library design takes into consideration users' goals as much as their tasks. Helping users achieve goals is the difference that makes some libraries great and others kind of "meh". It's much harder to put your finger on, but that's where qualitative data is especially useful.

Caveat (more for myself than anyone else):

It's important to remember to be flexible. While I have tried to design these with a spectrum of feedback in mind, I feel it's important to let the studies reveal things organically rather than forcing the results to conform to my expectations. This is my first time doing any UX/ethnographic studies so this is a learning experience for me and while I tend to like to rely on planning things to death before I do them in order to feel as prepared as possible, I need to make sure I'm open to going with the flow.

These studies are pretty much all based on the work of others so if I have failed to give proper credit I apologise.

Anyway, that's the plan as it stands at the moment! It's possibly a little ambitious for my first foray into UX studies but you don't learn anything unless you try.

Time to reflect

Lately I've really been enjoying my work. I've been able to choose projects I'm interested in including developing a series of UX studies to get a better sense of what direction the library should be moving in, I've built a pretty decent social media presence for the library, I've worked on redesigning our webpages and I've started thinking about in-house outreach we can do to help our students engage with our historic collections.

This has come out of a situation that initially I found absolutely awful, however: one in which I got very little feedback and had very little direction from above. I've learned to not let it bother me, assuming that the lack of feedback is a good sign, and the bits of feedback I have had are all positive. It was simply not a situation I was used to and I eventually had to come to terms with the idea that the freedom to shape my own role came with a lack of direct mentoring and oversight that I've tended to rely on my whole life. It took me this long to realise, though, that there is a way I can get feedback: I can get it from myself.

So, I'm going to do a bit of reflective writing on what I'm doing and where I see it going. This is primarily an exercise for myself, but I'm sharing it because I hope it's interesting or helpful to someone else too.

User Experience (UX)

After my recent write-up of the class I took from Georgina and Meg, I've started looking at studies I can do in the library. This morning I've finished a proposal for a series of studies that will culminate in a report including recommendations about where I believe the library can improve in terms of UX.

It's become a bit of a preoccupation of mine lately, thanks to Cambridge hosting the UX Libs conference. I didn't get to go to that but I followed the conference's Twitter hashtag (#UXLibs) avidly and got involved as much as I could, including going to see the final pitches and chatting with some of those involved.

A meme based on Heidegger's phenomenological terms for users' experience of technology. Source: http://twitter.com/HogwartsUXLib/status/580280726421147648

I'm not sure where I'm going with UX other than it's a tool I find really interesting and useful and I want to have it in my toolkit. Like that thing on Batman's utility belt that has a grappling hook shaped like a bat and an unbelievably strong wire that can apparently hold the body weight of several fully-grown henchmen and at least one Boy Wonder. I want to keep reading about UX and I'm looking forward to actually doing some studies of our users. I admit I'm a little intimidated by the idea, but excited by what insights we'll gain by doing them. More on those later, I'm sure.

Outreach

Last Thursday I attended an Oxford/Cambridge College Libraries exchange. It was hosted in Oxford and I gave my first ever conference-type presentation, about my library's digitisation project and how we are promoting it through social media and other channels. I got really nice feedback from that and despite how nervous I was I think I did okay. As with any conference, though, the best part was the conversations after the presentations. I met some really nice people and had some great talks.

My favourite presentation of the day was by a couple of college librarians talking about getting students to access historical collections. I loved their ideas and they really pushed me out of my self-created digital pigeon hole. They had some great, creative ways of increasing the visibility of librarians and historical collections to members of the college and I can't wait to propose some of them to my manager.

Social Media

Probably one of my proudest achievements has been the social media presence of the library, but I am certainly not perfect at it and I am learning a lot as I go along. The more I engage in professional and academic conversations on social media, the more I learn and the more excited I get about it. I think I find this arena very comfortable, though, because of its anonymity and the lack of personal contact. I am trying to be aware of how easy it is for me to slip into a mentality that assumes social/digital media is all the outreach you need. In my own experience, face-to-face outreach is still by far the most effective.

Oddly, I've also learned a lot more about Twitter in the last couple of weeks through using a fake account. It's highlighted for me some things I do wrong or that others to right, it's helped me think about things like voice, timing and so forth more than my personal or work accounts have. It just goes to show you that you never know where you're going to pick up useful skills.

Where am I going (and why am I in this hand-basket)?

A lot of people don't realise how many different directions there are to go in librarianship. Outside of libraries many people I know assume that it's a straightforward hierarchy, the top of which is Head Librarian and that of course that's everyone's goal. The fuzzy, diaphanous nature of information science these days, though, means that these old hierarchies and traditional roles are breaking down, if they ever really existed in the first place. There are dozens of distinct library/information roles I could reel off without much thought, and probably dozens more I haven't heard of. In ten years there will probably be even more library roles that we haven't even considered yet. Still, between CPD courses, CILIP Chartership, networking etc. I've been given the distinct impression that most library folks know pretty much where they want to go and how they want to get there.

Can I really be the odd one out for not knowing what I want to be doing in ten years? Or five? Or one? Is it so important to have a set destination in mind? This time last year I would have been vehement that it does matter and that anyone who said otherwise was probably unambitious, as if that's the worst thing you can be. I don't really know what I want for me, but I know what I want for my library in the next year, or five, or ten.

I want it to be better, and if I can help make that happen, that will be awesome.

In conclusion: the state of Library Sphinx

Ultimately I think if I were to give myself feedback about all of this, I'd say that I'm doing interesting research and coming up with good ideas but where I fall down is in having the guts to implement them. Because I don't have someone telling me to do a UX study, or arrange a library literacy course, I tend to balk when it comes to actually doing it. I need to be braver and see my ideas through. The OxCam conference showed me that doing things I'm intimidated by can be a great learning experience and a lot of fun. It can also open up new opportunities and ideas that I wouldn't have encountered otherwise. 

So, Self, be brave, be open to new experiences and keep working hard to make libraries more awesome. 

Radical librarianship?

I have a lot of thoughts bumping around in my head today, prompted in part by attending some classes and meetings with really amazing, inspiring librarians, but also from reflecting on my job and my place in the vast information landscape. I'm going to try to let some of these ideas out so I'm sorry if this blog post is a bit ad hoc.

I think the place to start with is admitting that libraries, particularly higher education libraries, are part of a system that traditionally reinforces privilege at every level. Although libraries can fill a radical role in communities, that ability lies chiefly in the actions of individual users and librarians. As institutions, libraries are traditionally prescriptive; us (the librarians) telling them (the users) what's good for them and how to get it. To quote nina de jesus, "Libraries as institutions were created not only for a specific ideological purpose but for an ideology that is fundamentally oppressive in nature. As such, the failings of libraries can be re-interpreted not as libraries failing to live up to their ideals and values, but rather as symptoms and evidence of this foundational and oppressive ideology." It is important to identify privilege in order to begin to address the problems it creates in terms of barriers between potential users and information resources.

HE librarians may not be able to rectify the admissions processes and broader economic issues that mean some demographics are underrepresented in our institutions, but we can dismantle our ideas about a hierarchical information landscape in which we sit at the top, or at a choke point between users and information. Many (I would think most) librarians already think this way, but many of the institutions in which we work and the systems in place are inherently conservative and over time the radical politics are driven out of individual librarians by time or my feeling the need to work with the system in order to progress in their careers.

The thing is, institutions and systems don't change unless people make it happen, which is why it is up to us, from the Librarians-with-a-capital-L down to the library assistants like me to struggle to change systems that we think are unfair, outdated or ineffective. I operate under the idea that one should never EVER tell oneself that caring about fairness and access is above (or below) your pay grade. The most revolutionary thing librarians can do is relinquish our power and realize that it was never real. Libraries are at their best in the hands of users. That means our role is to facilitate, to listen, to empathize, to collaborate and to be imaginative more than to instruct, preserve, dictate or control. Our expertise can be deployed in handing over the maps and keys to users and ensuring they understand how to use them rather than clinging onto them and insisting that they follow us.

I've been working with librarians throughout Cambridge lately who are of the same mind, pushing against institutions and ideologies that seem intractable at times to change the face of academic libraries. It's inspiring and humbling to sit around the table with them and have a voice. This encompasses everything I'm trying to do at the moment, from making the rare books and manuscripts collection more accessible to working on creative and engaging ways to help students develop their information literacy to conducting UX studies to find out just how much we don't know about our users. I know a lot of this is old news to lots of librarians, but privilege doesn't go away as soon as you embrace a user-focused approach. We need to constantly check ourselves to make sure we are not making assumptions about our users, what they know and how they work. We especially need to question our assumptions about our role in our users' lives. I believe that the more we hold on to the role of gatekeeper, the more irrelevant we will become. Conversely, the more we empower users, the more central to their academic and social growth we will become.

Anyway, these are the things I've been contemplating lately, sitting at the desk all quiet and everything.

UX and Ethnographic Methods for Librarians

I feel extraordinarily lucky to work where I do. I have a lot of latitude, including the opportunity to really shape my own role, I have been able to usher in pretty major changes in the culture and services at my library working from the bottom of the hierarchy and I have a pretty sweet work space from which to research exhibitions, explore avenues of outreach and publicity and keep up with what's going on in other libraries.

One of the nerve centres of the UX revolution (AKA my desk)

One of the best things about working here - and in Cambridge Libraries in general - is the focus placed on the CPD (continuing professional development) of library staff. We have great opportunities to learn and grow as a community, not least of which is the Librarians in Training courses that run throughout the year. If you're working in Cambridge libraries and haven't yet taken advantage of these, you should really think about doing so. Not only can you learn a lot from courses targeted to Cambridge librarians, but it's a fantastic opportunity to meet people from other libraries who will be your allies and resources in projects you might want to take on in future. (And they're all lovely people, it goes without saying!)

I attended a course yesterday afternoon entitled "UX and Ethnographic Methods for Librarians" taught by hippest-of-the-hip Cambridge librarians Meg Westbury (Wolfson) and Georgina Cronin (Judge Business School). Both of these women are inspirational innovators who really care about providing great services to library users and it's fantastic to get an insight into how they've done what they've done at their own institutions and for the wider Cambridge library community. The class itself was pretty much a perfect mixture of instruction and activity as far as I was concerned. I think I'm not alone in having had a really good time with it.

Introducing UX and ethnography

Meg began by defining and explaining UX and ethnography. Very briefly, UX (user experience) is a term originating with Apple, who are masters of the art. It encompasses UI (user interface) and usability (a term that itself encompasses how easy a tool or service is to navigate, learn, remember etc.), but goes beyond both to look at the qualitative dimensions of experience, emotion and cognition at the point where users interact with products or services. Essentially, it puts the focus on the individual's motivations, needs and feelings. It looks at barriers to use as well, trying to determine who is missing and why. Ethnography is writing about culture, with the worthy goal of doing so from ground level instead of top-down. As much as possible the aim is to understand the shifting points of view of the individual user without imposing assumptions or putting them in a static, statistical box. You can learn more about students from an ethnographic study with four participants, Meg said, than from surveying 100 with a standardized questionnaire.

Ethnographic UX research in libraries is growing rapidly as library professionals confront the fact that not only do we not necessarily know best about how to meet our users' needs but maybe we don't even know their needs as well as we like to think. As so-called "disruptive" technologies undermine the privileged position libraries have occupied as the sole gateways to information, how can we change our relationship to the information landscape and to our users in ways that will create meaningful, inspiring opportunities for our users? Luckily, UX research can be a lot easier to implement than more traditional research. Since you're looking for qualitative data that is not exhaustive so much as a window into a single user's experience at a single point in time, study design can be more flexible and creative. Many of the methods utilize things as basic as users' own mobile phones and post-it notes and require less planning and preparation than a questionnaire.

Methods

The majority of class time was spent looking at a few of the potential methods with Georgina, including trying them out for ourselves! First off was my favorite, cognitive mapping. The task was to draw from memory a map of your working spaces. The exercise lasted 6 minutes, and we changed pens every two minutes. This highlighted what was most significant in our minds, what was lower priority and what was most peripheral. (The order was blue, red, black, in case you want to psychoanalyze me based on the drawing below, i.e. I drew the Space Marine figure on my monitor long before drawing a representation of reshelving).

My cognitive map of the places I work. Don't judge me. I have not the skills of an artist.

Normally participants would label their maps and discuss them with the researcher, but before doing that we swapped maps with someone else and tried to interpret theirs without any labels. This clever exercise showed how easy it is to misinterpret or assume you know what something means when actually you have it all wrong. It was also interesting to experience firsthand how it is slightly nerve wracking to do the drawing but really quite fun to talk about the drawing afterward.

The other main activity was looking at observation. Georgina herself learned a lot about how users move through her library simply by sitting and watching for an hour at a time on different days. She created a heat map and a list of activities performed by library users and got a better idea of how people were actually using the space. We went out into the wilds of the University Library to try it out! It's surprisingly difficult to be discrete, especially when you're an adult in a student space. A few people were asked if they worked for the UL. Not so subtle. It is interesting how much you can learn even from five minutes. On the top floor I found that no one really stayed up there to work but rather came and got their books and left, but that there was some difficulty locating items, meaning users were backtracking a lot and looking at the signage to try to work out where their book was. There were many other interesting observations from the other participants as well. I think it's a useful method, but would work better in conjunction with something that elicited user responses as well, for instance maybe I would interview a few students about what spaces they avoided in the UL and why, or ask them to do a photo diary of places they feel confused in the library.

We received handouts at the end with a list of resources to get started (which I will copy below) and an expanded list of methods (which I won't copy, but I'm sure Meg and/or Georgina would be happy to supply if you email them). I'll be hanging on to these long-term, I think, and referring to them for inspiration.

Conclusion-y type things

After a discussion about analyzing and presenting the results, the class ended with a brief discussion of ethics, which boiled down to common sense: let participants know how you're going to use their data, and don't let incentives create an imbalance of power or a sense of obligation. When in doubt, use a consent form, and let participants know that they can leave the study at any time. Also, food-based incentives are often more than enough to make participants feel appreciated for giving you their time.

One thing I would have liked to discuss in more detail is what kinds of questions lend themselves to these sorts of studies. I came away feeling like people might just pick a study that sounded fun without first designing it to address a specific gap in knowledge. I think it would be more useful to start from a particular aspect or question you wanted to investigate, as in this passage from Nancy Fried Foster et al.:

"Our first task was to identify one trenchant research question to guide the project. The question we developed was, What do students really do when they write their research papers? Between the assignment of a research paper and the finished, submitted product was a black box that largely concealed the processes undertaken by the student. We wanted to take a peek into that box to see what we could find. We felt that this question accurately reflected our ignorance of student work habits while providing a manageable focus for our information-gathering activities." - Studying Students

I like that this passage acknowledges the ignorance of the researchers. In studying social science research methodology for my librarianship course I often felt that studies commenced with researchers already having an idea about the results in their heads. It left little room for flexibility and possibly influenced interpretation, especially when studies attempted to fit qualitative experiences into quantitative data. Statistics have their place, of course, but they don't tell a story and they certainly don't put the individual at the heart of research.

I will certainly be using some of these methods to conduct studies in my own library and have already started annotating my hand-outs with potential research topics/questions.

I'm sticking notes on so I can keep the handout for longer. Yeah.

I really enjoyed this course and got a lot out of it, most importantly the confidence that this is something very achievable and useful to do. I am excited to find out what my library users need and want, and how we can more closely align our services to those real needs. Thanks, Meg and Georgina!

Resources to get started

• Nancy Fried Foster et al., Studying Students: A Second Look. Free download at http://bit.ly/1Bj5QMp
• ERIAL Project Toolkit: http://www.erialproject.org/publications/toolkit/
• Donna Lanclos, The Anthropologist in the Stacks: http://www.donnalanclos.com/
• Cennydd Bowles and James Box, Undercover User Experience Design (2010)
• Leah Buley, The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide (2013)
• Sam Ladner, Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in the Private Sector (2014)
• Martyn Denscombe, The Good Research Guide for Small-Scale Social Research Projects (2010)
• #UKAnthroLib blog: http://ukanthrolib.wordpress.com