Presented at the second UXLibs conference, held in Manchester in June 2016. Won the award for best presentation :-)
Check out this blog post for a better context to the slides: https://konferensrapport.wordpress.com/2016/07/07/my-presentation-at-uxlibs-ii/
1. Insert own photo
Insert a photograph that fills the slide and
place it furthest back (rght-click and select
“send to back”). Then remove the sample
photo! (select an press “delete”)
Going rogue with your methods – or
what happens when you let a non-user
loose in the library
INGELA WAHLGREN, ÅSA FORSBERG, LUND UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
2. Our study
• Aim: create decision basis for developing the library space
• Mixed methods
– Focus groups
– LibQual comments
– Interviews
– Graffiti board
– Observations
– Cognitive mapping
– Touchstone tours
3.
4.
5. Touchstone tours and going rogue
• Contextual inquiry
• Idea during planning stage – what if we could find a
complete noob?
• Seize the opportunity
6.
7. Lessons learned
• Few respondents/participants can give many insights
• Ask people in person – higher response rate
• Takes effort/time and/or luck to find non users
8. Thank you and Happy Midsummer!
• Ingela.wahlgren@ub.lu.se
• @ingyplingy
Notes de l'éditeur
Hello,
My name is Ingela Wahlgren and I work at the Lund university library in south of Sweden. If you recognise me it might be bevause I attended the ffirst Uxlibs conference last year in Cambridge, and was a part of Team Noir.
This paper has two authors, me and my colleague Åsa Forsberg who couldn’t be with us here today.
So, in this presentation I am going to talk very briefly about the large user study that we did with a mixed methods approach to investigate the usage of our library space. Then I am going to go in to more detail on one of the touchstone tours that we did, and then I will end with a few lessons learned. Ok, so if anyone feels they are in the wrong room then this si the time to politely sneadk out…
So, me and Åsa work in the Library services unit in our library, and that means we are about five people who are responsible for managing and developing the public library space, and also general services offered and some pedagogical activities, such as tours of the library and book a librarian. During the autumn semester of 2015 we conducted this study with the aim of creating a decision basis for developing the library space. We used all of these methods….
Before I go into the particulars of our touchstone tours I think uou might need some background on our library. This library was built in 1907 in a neo-gothic style…. We have ssen in our studiy that our visitors make a certain assoicaition when they first see this facade …can anyone gues what?
Since our library is a legal deposit library we have always needed more space, and so there have been additions made to this building several time, so that now it si one very large and massive structure, stretching ”that way”.
1907 ”this shoild be enough for at least 50 years”
1936 book tower
1957 addition by Klas Anshelm , a famous Swedish architext
And finally additional office space and an internal mezzanine floor in 1994
Once inside, this is what you see as you have passed through our exhibition space and you enter the actual library
Perhaps Northern Europes largest reference desk?
A so called touchstone tour is a form of contextual inquiry, meaning you investigate and interview the respondent in his or hers natural habitat or place oof business. In this case, with a student, that might be their home, a café or in our case, our library space.
We found our four regular participants by catching people as they were walking through the door, worked quite well. When walking through thte library, we recorded audio and took pictures to remember the specific touchstones.
When planning the touchstone tours, my colleague Åsa, as I remember it, had the idea that we should try and do a touchstone tour with someone who had never visited or used our library before the tour. But how to find such a person???
We had already been in contact with some representatives from the different student unions, since they had participated in one of our focus groups, so we reached out to them and asked if they could help us find some non users.
But, time went by and we focused on doing all those other things we had planned, the maps and interviews and focus groups and so on… then one day we had a request for a Book-a-librarian appointment from a girl who had never visited our library, and Åsa, again was smart and asked me to conduct the tour with this girl right after her appointment wirth Åsa.
She came to us for her appointment and was during that meeting asked if she was willing to participate in our study. She was happy to and we did not have to construct any tasks for her to do, as she anyway wanted to look for books on methodoogy and borrow them if she found something interesting. (although we actually had constructed a task, we just didn’t have to use it). We had one rule: that she couldn’t ask me for help.
II did step in a few times to help out, as you will see when we start taking the tour. Any questions beforewe move on into the tour?
Computer log in fail - button
Library card at info desk and also computer account!