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>> Welcome back.
Welcome to week three.
So this week we're going to be learning about how to get
to know your patrons and their environment.
And for this week, we're going to look at different methods for assessing patron needs,
so patron needs assessment tools, different technologies, different methods,
and ways to better understand student information-seeking behaviors.
You're going to read some interesting articles and book chapters that kind of give you a window
into ways of doing this and ways that libraries have done it.
You're also going to look at ways to scan the academic environment.
This is critical if you want to actually embed library services into the academic environment.
We're going to look at ways to better understand the curriculum in a specific subject area,
curriculum mapping being a great example of that.
And also looking at the costs and benefits of each approach, because some are very easy
to do and some take a lot of effort.
Some yield okay data and some yield a whole lot of really great data.
So we're going to look at that, as well, especially in your readings.
So, why do you need to get to know your patrons?
I mean, the answer seems fairly simple.
And yet, most libraries do not actually do a great deal of user assessment.
And you can get it right eventually, if you don't know your users.
Eventually you might, if you're lucky, you will hit the target, but there are going
to be a lot of times when you won't.
And we spend a lot of times in libraries trying things,
piloting things that really don't meet needs, tossing them, trying something else,
and eventually maybe we're lucky and we get it right,
but we waste a lot of time not getting it right.
And the only way to get into the user's workflow is
to really understand their information-seeking behaviors.
We can't do it otherwise; we have to know how they actually work.
And we often rely on our own intuition to make decisions in libraries.
You know, we look in a crystal ball and think, oh, yeah, I totally know how my patrons use X,
you know, because maybe I worked with one patron and I saw what they did,
or this is what I do, so I'm just making assumptions.
We often think that we are our patrons, and that our patrons are like us
when librarians are definitely a different kind of beast.
You know, my friend, Roy Tennant once said, librarians like to search, users like to find,
and I think that's one of the key differences between us.
And you know, we have to better understand our patrons, because we're not them at all.
So we should start by asking some questions,
and these are questions you should ask any time you're doing any sort of assessment project.
Start with, "What do I actually need to know."
I've seen so many badly designed assessment tools that are bad simply
because they didn't ask those questions, they just asked, you know, they created a survey
with lots of questions, but it wasn't really targeted to what information they want to have.
So think about at the end of this work, what do I hope to find out from my users,
and then design whatever you need based on that.
Also, look at what sources of information are already easily at your disposal.
For example, I'm working on a committee right now
at Cross Campus that's examining the first-year experience.
And we're collecting a lot of data that already exists, because there's a lot of stuff
out there, the National Survey on Student Engagement, looking at our students' scores
on that, and looking at them versus other institutions.
Great, great useful, helpful data.
And we also do a lot of other assessments that we could lean on.
But also, thinking about what you can do to get additional info and how much time you have
to get that, because you can do a deep ethnographic study of your users,
but not if you need the data into two weeks, or if you don't have any resources to get it done
in terms much time and money and people.
So, you know, thinking about what possibilities are out there for getting the information
and what your limitations or [inaudible] are is really important.
So on that committee that I'm on, we're also interviewing people who are experts
in specific parts of the first-year experience.
They're coming to our meetings and talking to us.
We're developing surveys, and we're doing interviews and focus groups.
Very valuable ways to get information, and they're not super-duper time consuming.
That work for what we need to be doing.
There are lots of lots of great ways to get
to know patron needs regarding the library and information.
The first is reference desk transactions.
When I was creating library DIY, which, like I said in week one,
is a tool to provide point-of-need support to our users, I wanted to get a sense
of what are the common questions that students have.
And we luckily have a system where we keep track of our reference desk statistics.
We actually make a note of what we -- sorry, I'm forgetting the word.
We make a note of what the question was and our answer.
Not everybody does it, but there's enough information there
to see what the common questions are that people are getting.
I also talk to our librarians who are at the reference desk the most to get a sense
of what they saw as the really common questions.
Website analytics are extremely valuable.
You can see how users are using your website, where they're having problems,
where things go wrong, where the bounce -- you know, where they bounce off the site,
because maybe things didn't work out.
Like we found for some reason with our original widget that we had in Desire2Learn
in our Learning Management System, looking at the stats, a lot of students were clicking
on our "E-mail a Librarian" page and then disappearing, and then leaving the site.
Obviously, that wasn't where they wanted to end up being,
so we ended up redesigning the widget based on that information.
Very, very valuable.
Usability testing -- oh, surveys, sorry.
Surveys are kind of the, you know, the very common way that we do needs assessments.
They're still very useful.
They can be very hard to get people to actually fill out.
Make them short and sweet, offer really good incentives and you might have a fighting chance.
I'm engaged in a survey right now as part of an ethnographic study that I'm doing
of returning students, and we offered like some really awesome prizes, like a Kindle Fire
and a $100 Amazon gift card to get people to do it,
and we are getting a pretty good response rate.
Usability testing.
I've done this several times in my career, usability testing of a website,
and you never really know how your students are going to use a website
until you actually watch them use it.
It's just incredibly fun to watch.
I always enjoy that, and part of what we did
in our ethnographic study, I recorded users doing research.
I used a screen capture software, like what I'm using right now to work
with this lecture, to record them doing research.
And just seeing how they use WorldCat Local was like, oh, my God,
I had no idea how busy the design was and how that impacted users.
You know, I always thought it sucked,
but for completely different reasons, so it was really interesting.
Obviously, you get already existing studies of students either
at your institution or general ones.
You can never totally generalize, you know, looking at a study from Educause
or something on how students do research.
Your student population may be different, but it gives you something on which to go.
Ethnographic research, which I'm going to talk about in just a second,
and also assessment of student work.
The summer, I and a team looked at freshman student research papers using a rubric,
an information literacy rubric that we developed, and it was so interesting to see
where things went wrong in students' research.
It gave us some great insights that we were able to take
into our instruction work in the next fall.
So ethnographic research is very hot in libraries these days, also very time consuming,
and I know because I'm doing an ethnographic study and have been engaged
in it for about a year and a half now.
We're looking at returning students, the students with a gap in their education,
in their formal education, to see what their research needs are,
what their research habits are and how we can help.
So an ethnographic study is basically a mixed methods qualitative research study
where you use all these different kinds of qualitative research methods
to better understand a popular population.
So in our case, we filmed users doing research, like I mentioned.
We did a survey with a bunch of, like, qualitative kinds of questions,
like "What do you do first when you do research, what are you good at,
what would you like to improve at," questions like that.
We did focus groups.
We did research journals, along with interviews, and we did photo diaries.
And the information we've been getting is so interesting and so illuminating
about how our patrons, or specifically, our returning students, approach research,
what their anxieties are, what stresses they have, and gives us some insight
as to how we can better serve them.
But there are a lot of other really cool ways of doing ethnographic research.
There's mapping diaries where users map how they go around campus every day
and where they go and what they do.
A photo diary, students take pictures.
You usually give them some prompts, and they take pictures of those things,
like "a place where you feel comfortable studying."
And you'll see all the different pictures that students take of that
and it's just really fascinating.
Field observation, where you actually just sit and watch students
and take notes on what they're doing.
Space design is where you have students actually draw like their ideal library space,
or even a specific space within the library.
And then cognitive maps.
And I don't remember exactly what one does with cognitive maps.
I think it's like -- oh, no, I do remember now, sorry.
It's where they draw the library from memory and every 30 seconds they change the color of marker
that they're using so you can see what they draw first
and what stands out to them in the library.
It's a very interesting idea.
We really had no influence over space design, so we didn't do a lot of those
that really were designed to influence space design.
So lots of ways to get to know the university.
And the best way is to really just start talking to people.
I know when I was new to Portland State, I set up meetings with a lot of faculty members
and administrators who I thought could give me useful information on how things work here.
Looking at demographic data is always valuable.
I was surprised when I came here by how large our returning student population is,
how large our transfer student population is.
It was very helpful to look at.
Read documents from the institution, mission statement, vision statement, strategic plans,
any curriculum reviews, any, if there are, like, reports to accrediting agencies
that are available, that kind of stuff is going to tell you so much about the institution.
Also, consider looking at already existing studies of students, like I mentioned before,
NSSE, the National Survey of Student Engagement.
There are lots of assessment tools that,
national ones that your institution probably already participates in,
and that information is going to be extremely valuable in your,
in getting a picture of the university as a whole.
Also, there's a lot of really great ways to get to know the curriculum,
and you're going to read some good stuff about curriculum mapping this week.
Talking to faculty, if you're the liaison to a specific department, talking to faculty
in that area is the way to get in.
I'm new to three of my liaison areas this fall, and going to faculty meetings and meeting
with department chairs is a great way for me to get a sense of what the department is about,
what the needs are, and I've had some really good opportunities to talk to faculty.
Reading syllabi, I think it's something that not enough librarians do,
but that's really valuable is to collect syllabi from the departments that you serve
and get a sense of what they teach, what resources they use,
what kinds of research assignments they're giving.
Talking to students, if you're able to connect with students,
probably you do research consultations, you work with them in class.
Talk to them, get a sense of what their needs are.
And finally, curriculum mapping.
Really looking at how students progress through the curriculum,
what classes are research intensive, where does it make sense
to embed information literacy into the curriculum.
Like I say here, it's not just a tool for getting to know the curriculum,
but also for getting to know the places where information literacy can be embedded.
So as you can imagine, I'm a big fan of ethnographic research, so I definitely wanted
to have some readings on that this week, but also,
I think curriculum mapping is a critical tool for learning for about one's department.
So there's some really great readings this week about needs assessments
and academic environmental scanning and whatnot.
I think you're really going to enjoy.
And once you know your users better, you're going to have a much better chance
of actually serving them effectively on the first try,
rather than continually trying and failing.
All right, enjoy your week.