Co-edited by yours truly. From our press release:
We are pleased to announce the release of a new book, Scholarly Practice, Participatory Design and the eXtensible Catalog, based on user research for eXtensible Catalog, available now from ACRL or Amazon.
As part of the development of eXtensible Catalog (XC), a project to develop open source software sponsored by the University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries, and funded by the Mellon Foundation and project partners, four institutions conducted eighty interviews and numerous workshops to understand how researchers learn about, acquire, and use scholarly resources. Research findings informed the design and development of XC, a set of open-source applications that provides access to resources across a range of databases, metadata schemas, and standards. In this volume, members of the project team report on key findings of the user research that was done at Cornell University, Ohio State University, the University of Rochester, and Yale University, and discuss the value of including library users and technology specialists from many disciplines in the software design and development process. Editors: Nancy Fried Foster, Katie Clark, Kornelia Tancheva and Rebekah Kilzer. Authors: Jennifer Bowen, Kaila Bussert, Katherine Chiang, Katie Clark, Maureen Donovan, Nancy Fried Foster, Gabriela Castro Gessner, David Lindahl, Melissa S. Mead, Kornelia Tancheva and Wendy Wilcox.
I was listening to a webcast that Peggy recommended and I found a section of the talk very interesting regarding organizing electronic documents in support of research. The second presenter that focused on organizing pdfs in support of your research, and other tools that can help you organize your research documentation and citations.
You can listen to the section of the webcast here. This particular section starts at about 16 minutes in, and it’s only about 10 minutes long.
Some of the featured product links:
Papers for reading/organizing
Sente for citations
Scrivener for writing
In a recent article in Library and Information Research, Andrew Walsh discusses the results of a study that explored the attitudes students have toward mobile services in the academic library.
A few things that I found interesting were that students felt that getting texts from the library would be welcome if the information was useful. They’d also be okay with being automatically subscribed as long as it was easy to opt-out; they didn’t want to miss out on a useful tool. They don’t really want to experiment with new things unless it’s clear how it will be useful to them as individuals. Utility is clearly a theme.
From the conclusion:
The results suggest that libraries considering increasing their services aimed at mobile users should:
a) Initially introduce services that use text messaging, not the mobile web.
b) Concentrate on services that potential users can immediately see benefits for, such as “reminders” of overdue books, rather than services with less obvious, or less mainstream benefits.
c) Make sure that any mobile friendly services are marketed carefully, selecting the groups most likely to benefit from them and directly stressing those benefits to the potential users in any promotional activities.
Some of the things mentioned in the study that might be worth exploring, at least as a pilot:
Text reminders for overdue/renewals
Text reminders for work shifts
Text when a book comes in
Texts for room booking reminders
The study was conducted at the University of Huddersfield in the UK in 2009.
Citation:
Walsh, A. (2010), “Mobile phone services and UK Higher Education students, what do they want from the library?” Library and Information Research. Vol.34, No.106, pp.22-36.
[PDF here]
