Anthropology at the Office

I learned a lot at the recent CALL/ACBD/MichALL Conference. I am very happy to report (just in case my management team wonders why they send me to these things) that I am putting one of the things I learned into immediate practice.

Susan Gibbons, Vice Provost and Andrew H. & Janet Dayton Neilly Dean at River Campus Libraries at the University of Rochester, gave a plenary presentation on May 11 titled “Avoiding Obsolescence: Understanding and Engaging the Net Generation”. Susan’s talk had several objectives including understanding what the new generation of library users expect from libraries. She discussed the application of anthropology to user studies.

Susan discussed several projects that her team has undertaken, including user studies of websites…what I have interpreted as “five minutes with a red pen”. She discussed having students at her institution look at paper mock ups of library web pages and giving them free food or $5 and asking them to cross out what they didn’t like and add elements that they did.

My library team is working on repositioning our intranet content for easier access. We are now implementing 5 minutes with a red pen. Instead of building sites and moving things around based on feedback – giving our internal users a fait accompli and then seeking feedback validating our clever choices – we are asking them for input first. Rather than $5 or free food, I am giving out the new CanLII Quick Reference cards I picked up at the conference. So far I am getting great feedback that will save a lot of development time.

Susan’s session covered other aspects of her research too. Thanks Susan.