Category: UX

What We Know and What They Know: Scholarly Communication, Usability, and Un-Usability.

Over the past handful of years, a lot of digital ink has been spilled on library responses to #icanhazpdf, SciHub, and, most recently, the #Twitterlibraryloan movement. This hit home in my life because  in recent discussion with students at my University, we found that students told us outright that they used SciHub because of its ability to “get most things.”

How we talk about piracy with our patrons is an important topic for discussion, and places a tremendous amount of emphasis on the ethics of a for-profit publishing model. But it places librarians in a precarious situation defending publishing practices that build barriers to research.

SciHub Pirates, from the Rjiksmuseum in Amsterdam. Schip van de schrijver Jean de Thevenot door zeerovers overmeesterd, Jan Luyken, 1681

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lydia Thorn wrote an excellent piece about teaching professors and students about the importance of legal means of acquisition, pointing to an expectation of immediate access and declining library budgets as culprits in this explosion of piracy. Thorn suggests pointing to the ways in which piracy hurts small presses and not-for-profit publishers and how the library can and should fill these needs. She also suggests that we point to several open models that provide access to materials without the illegality of piracy.

Switching gears slightly, it reminds me of the difficulties I have in working with faculty on online scholarly profiles. Because I administer DigitalCommons@USU, and its profiling system Selected Works, I am often confronted with faculty and students who use the for-profit academic profiling systems (I’m using this difficult phrase to talk about the systems that we all know but I’d rather not name) that are extremely popular across the world and across disciplines.

What brings these two examples and issues together is the way in which we, as librarians, promote ourselves as experts in this realm and how, in a lot of ways, our strategies for promoting our services fall flat. Faculty are not cynical monsters who actively search for ways to be “anti-library,” but make rational choices that fit what they need. They aren’t very often knowledgeable about the inner working of collection development or the serials crisis but they are knowledgeable about what they need right now in their academic careers.

I explain to my faculty, much like Thorn suggests, that the for-profit profiling systems are sometimes deceptive, corporate, and, often times, include illegal materials. While the illegality of the for-profit profiles often reaches faculty, who want to avoid any legal entanglements, the prevalence of these systems does not seem to be waning. The library’s 100% legal version pales in popularity in comparison to the others, who are often much more popular in certain fields. Who am I to tell professors not to choose these options in academic areas where for-profit profiles are more valuable than the library’s resources? Despite my feelings to the contrary, sometimes the for-profit profiles fit certain scholars well.

This brings me back to the issues surrounding SciHub and #Icanhazpdf. The important thing to remember about our users is that they spend much less time than we do worrying about these things. For them, the ease of use of a for-profit profile or a pirated pdf warehouse is an issue of access and not a preference towards profits or not-profits. While each choice we make as actors is political, I do not believe that our faculty who use these platforms are willfully ignorant or disloyal to their institutions, libraries, or librarians. They just want what they want, when they want it.

Carolyn Gardner and Gabriel Gardner speak to this in their College and Research Libraries article from earlier this year:

“Poor usability is also hindering our patrons from gaining access to materials. Librarians need to apply user experience thinking to all our online systems. At our respective libraries, we have to click multiple times just to discover if an item is own. Besides complicated discovery methods, software or holdings errors are possible…Librarians need to view these crowdsourced communities as alternatives that fill a gap that we have yet to meet as opposed to purely underground and shadowy communities.” (CRL February 2017 pg 144)

When the film and television industries felt the crunch from piracy they invested in Netflix and created Hulu, and when the music industry faltered we got Spotify and other streaming platforms. Each of these systems allowed for the quick access to media that users stole to gain access to. Libraries should view SciHub and for-profit profiling systems not as a betrayal but as a call to change and action. If SciHub is easier to use than the library we cannot blame our users if they use it over our complicated systems. If the for-profit profiling systems are superior to the library administered in someways, perhaps that is what our faculty are looking for.

We as librarians shouldn’t  “teach” our patrons to adapt to our obtuse and oftentimes difficult systems but libraries should adapt to the needs of our patrons. I really do not want to be at odds with my colleagues who call for education on these issues, because education is needed on these issues. After all, we are in the business of education. Yet, I believe that, in some ways, we should respect our faculty for what they do know. They know that they need resources to do their job. They should know that the library is often the best source for these resources. They also know that there are some platforms that provide easier access to these materials. I do not begrudge faculty who seek easier paths towards the resources they need to do their jobs, as much as I don’t begrudge undergraduates (or librarians) who use Wikipedia as a first source of quick info. It is a symptom of the age of easy access to materials online, and it is something that we as librarians should learn about what our scholars are looking for.

The second part of this is adpatation. We should not only respect our patron’s decision making processes but we should listen when  faculty seek sleazier means towards library services, and adapt to this need. If the for-profit profiles do something that my profiles don’t, I should think about ways to build my system to reflect those needs. If access to materials needs to be quicker than three clicks through our system, we should work to make it easier to gain legal access to materials. We shouldn’t claim that we know more than they do just because we deal with our obtuse systems on the daily, we should adapt to their needs when they arise.

 

Bite-sized Change

Editor’s Note: We welcome Veronica Arellano-Douglas to the ACRLog team. Veronica is a Research and Instruction Librarian at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Her research interests include critical librarianship, information literacy, and pedagogy; graphic design and visual communication in libraries; and diversity, equity, and inclusion in LIS.

For years I believed that for change to have any kind of impact, it had to be drastic. I place the blame for this misapprehension squarely on the shoulders of cable TV producers and women’s magazine editors, who seem to have an uncanny ability to tap into the power transformation holds over the human psyche.  

Watch an exhausted working mom’s stunning makeover! See this outdated kitchen become a chef’s dream space! Read about the man who went from couch to triathlon in just 3 months!

I suppose I share some of the blame as well. No one forced me to watch hours of HGTV and What Not to Wear, and yet the promise of drastic change lured me in every time I turned on the TV. There’s inspiration that comes from seeing extreme transformation. It can teach us to dream big and marvel at the amazing capacity humans have for change. It can also be paralyzing. It can overwhelm us with the enormity of the process of change and leave us feeling like we’ll never live up to our potential.

How does change begin?

My library has been in a period of transition over the past few years. Expected retirements, unexpected departures, well-deserved parental leaves, and new additions have all had a significant impact on our library services and the day-to-day work of our library faculty and staff.  Understandably, we’ve been in reaction-mode for a while now–trying to maintain our core mission while deflecting potential negative impacts on services and workflow.

This last academic year was different. It was time for a change of our own making.

Although we continued to tread water in our daily practice, my colleagues and I decided to take a more proactive approach to our relationship with our students. Knowing that our Anthropology faculty frequently collaborated with campus units on ethnographic research projects for its majors, in fall 2015 we offered ourselves and the Library as “clients” to students in an Applied Anthropology course. Our intent was the learn more about the students at our quirky, small, public, liberal arts, honors college. We wanted to know more about how they integrate the library’s resources into their academic work, interact with librarians, and use the library space throughout their day. Working under the guidance and mentorship of their professor and experienced researcher Dr. Bill Roberts, the Applied Anthropology students created research questions, determined which ethnographic research methods would best answer those questions, and carried out the methods with us–the librarians–as additional researchers.

It was participatory action research at its best. Librarians and students were both researchers and research “subjects,” continuously making meaning from discussions with one another and modifying research questions as new information was gathered. Everyone had a stake in this project. The anthropology faculty member and students were so enthused that they continued their work in a new class in the spring and will likely take it up again this coming fall. You can read more about the project and our specific methods on our Library Ethnography Project Libguide.

What do we do with all this information?

This ethnographic project was meaningful as an act of collaboration and as an opportunity for faculty, students, and librarians to learn from one another. But it was also important to all of us that this process be practical, that it produce data that would lead to positive change for the library and students. Or, in the words of one of my amazing colleagues, “So… we’re actually doing to do something with this information, right?”

Right. But what exactly should we do?

Qualitative data (the kind gathered from surveys, focus groups, and free-listing) is big, unwieldy, and complex. It can feel intimidating and overwhelming. It’s easy to give into the mistaken belief that just because the project itself was big–lots of time, lots of people involved–the changes it inspires need to be equally big. There’s pressure to create the kind of dramatic transformation that would lead to a research article, a feature in Library Journal, or a mention in AL Direct.

But change doesn’t have to be big to be impactful.  

One of our project collaborators, a cataloger by training, grouped and categorized much of the qualitative information gleaned from our open-ended survey questions and focus groups into “actionable issues.” (Annie Armstrong, Catherine Lantz, Annie Pho, and Glenda Insua gave a fantastic presentation at LOEX 2016 on action coding, or coding qualitative information for change if you’re interested in learning more about this practice.) What was most surprising to us was the mundanity of the issues and concerns our students brought up again and again:

  • The temperature in the building is erratic and uncomfortable.
  • Our discovery layer is confusing and unhelpful at times.
  • There are never enough outlets available.
  • It is not clear where certain things are located in the library or what services are available.
  • Reservations for group study rooms are confusing.
  • The library is too loud.

There were of course, other issues, but you can see that the over all theme centers around quite small, ground-level, day-to-day issues. They don’t require a giant library renovation or a complete overhaul of services, but they do inspire change. Through this project, we’ve learned that there are small things we can change about our library and our work that can positively impact our students’ experiences in the library. Things like

  • Designating a portion of our 2nd floor as quiet study space.
  • Posting daily reservation schedules on our group study room doors.
  • Creating aesthetically-pleasing and cohesive signage for our library.
  • Changing our implementation of the default discovery layer settings.
  • Creating monthly PSAs and advertising campaigns highlighting specific library services, parts of the collection, or aspects of the building.
  • Making more extension cords available around the building for student use.

These are our immediate responses to things that are directly under our control. They aren’t earth-shattering, but we think they’ll make a difference to our students and be noticeable to them in the fall. We also have long-term actions we’d ultimately like to see happen, but we aren’t letting the need for radical transformation prevent us from making the small, necessary changes that are easy for a small library like ours.

There’s still another month left before our students return and classes begin, and we’re using the time to carry out some of the actions listed above. What kind of changes (big or small) have you implemented or discussed in your library this summer?