Digital scholarship study
Project description
In 2011, I was on a small team that investigated users’ research habits. We used ethnographic studies to plan physical space updates in 5 libraries, and we conducted interviews of faculty, grad students, and undergrads to learn about their research practices.
We summarized results in a few ways, including documents and staff presentations.
We categorized the results into 4 themes and created info cards, to remind staff about users’ research habits as they make decisions about services and physical spaces.
Challenges
While it was fairly simple to ask users questions that would get them to tell us about their research practices, distilling information from many hours of interviews in a digestable way to communicate to many other library staff was a challenge. We summarized the data in multiple ways:
- all-staff presentations where we chatted about our findings and displayed poignant user quotes
- created cards that summarized the 4 key themes that we found
- embedded ourselves into staff meetings & projects where we’d bring up key points from the research when relevant