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User experience in public and academic libraries
Posted on April 9th, 2010 15 comments
User experience treasure map © Peter Morville
A couple of recent events got me thinking about differences and similarities of public and academic libraries in the digital age. I used to think that current and future digital developments would in the end result in public and academic libraries moving closer to each other, but now I’m not so sure anymore. Let me explain how this happened.
On April 1st I attended the UgameUlearn 2010 symposium organised by Delft University Library and DOK, “The library Concept Center“, a public library. Two of the speakers there were David Lee King, Digital Branch & Services Manager at Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library, and Michael Stephens, Assistant Professor Library and Information Science at Dominican University. Have a look at David’s and Michael’s slides.
A week before that I had the opportunity to see Helene Blowers speak at DB Update 2010 about “Reality check 2.010 – 5 trends shaping libraries“. She is Digital Strategy Director for the Columbus Metropolitan Library and the inventor of 23 Things. Also John Blyberg was there, Assistant Director for Innovation and User Experience of Darien Library, another well known innovative public library. He presented SOPAC, “the Social OPAC”.
© UgameUlearn - Geert van den Boogaard
The central topic of the presentations of these four people, all working for, or mainly dealing with, public libraries, was and is “connecting with the public“, both in material and digital ways: by creating inviting, welcoming and collaborative spaces, both in physical library locations and online.
What particularly hit me was the fact that David Lee King’s official title is “digital branch manager“, meaning that the library’s online activities, or web presence, constitute just another branch beside and equal to the physical branch locations, which has to be managed as one front office in a coherent way.Judging by all four people’s job descriptions and presentations, public libraries appear to be very much involved in improving user experience (UX) and web presence. How is this in academic libraries? I think it’s different. I started to think that university and public libraries are moving in different directions the day before UgameUlearn, when I participated in the final session of a brainstorming and discussion track about the future of the library, more particularly of the Library of the University of Amsterdam, the institution I work for. Some of our conclusions are:
- 90% of the university library’s material will be digital
- Physical library buildings will disappear
- Library tasks and services will be more closely tied to the university’s core business, education and research.
Only the Heritage and Special Collections departments will still have lots of physical books, journals and other objects, and become a separate museum-like entity. I think they should have a look at Michael Edson‘s UgameUlearn slides about the efforts that are being done at the Smithsonian Institute to engage their audience.
The “digital branch” concept was not identified as a separate development in the future of the library discussion, probably because effectively we will see separate branches developing per subject area. Currently, at the Library of the University of Amsterdam, managing the Library’s web presence is the shared responsibility of the three main central divisions: Acquisition and Metadata Services, Public Services and Electronic Services, and a number of Faculty/Departmental Libraries. Still, the digital branch idea is an interesting concept to investigate, at least for the short term. But at university libraries a digital branch should extend its tasks beyond user experience alone.
Anyway, the day after UgameUlearn Helene Blowers, David Lee King and Michael Stephens were guests in the live stream show “This week in libraries”, organised by Jaap van de Geer and Erik Boekesteijn, both DOK, and also two of the four UgameUlearn organisers.
I took my chance and asked them the question: “What should a digital branch in an academic library look like? Different from public library?” If you’re interested, you will find the question and answers towards the very end of the stream.
Helene, David and Michael agreed more or less that there probably isn’t much difference, that you should ask your community what they want, and that, just like with public libraries, every community has different needs. A clear distinction is that in universities there are three groups of customers: students, faculty and staff, with somewhat different needs. University libraries should at least support the learning process, for instance by creating spaces for collaboration.Since then I had the chance of giving this some more thought, and I came to the conclusion that there are probably more differences than similarities between public and academic libraries. Not in the least because Aad Janson of the Peace Palace Library commented (in Dutch) that their library is an academic library too but without students and scientists. This made me realise that there are several different types of libraries, distinguished by a number of important characteristics (audience, subscription, collection type, funding) that influence their position in digital developments. I have tried to compose a, definitely not complete, summary of these library types in a table. I guess the Peace Palace Library would qualify as a “research/scientific library” in this classification scheme.
Library type
Audience
Subscription
Collection
Funding
Public
local community voluntary local, mostly physical subscriptions, public (local) National
national, global voluntary national physical + digital public (national) Research/scientific
specific professions, students voluntary local physical, remote digital pubic, private Museums/archives global community voluntary local physical + digital public, private Special explicitly defined voluntary, automatic local physical + digital public, private Company
staff automatic local physical + digital, remote digital private Governmental bodies
staff automatic local physical + digital, remote digital public International organisations
staff automatic local physical + digital, remote digital public, private University/higher education students, faculty, staff automatic local physical + digital, remote digital public, private
I presume that libraries that are dependent on voluntary subscriptions, like public and research/scientific libraries, will put more effort into improving “user experience”. This will be reinforced if the library’s collection is not a unique selling point, and funding is partly based on patron fees. Public libraries have to compete for customers (and not with their collections) and at the same time satisfy local city councils.On the other end of the scale we see university libraries that get there customers “into the bargain”, customers who need their affiliation to get access to restricted databases and e-journal articles. Contrary to public libraries, the collections of university/higher education libraries consist of more than the local catalogue: numerous local and remote repositories, databases, e-journals, etc. Consequently, these libraries will put relatively more effort into consolidating and linking all these databases, especially when they have the technical staff to do so. The contributions by academic libraries, and also some national and museum libraries, to linked data and mashup developments for instance seem to confirm this.
Libraries between these two extremes will probably merge both approaches in various ways, depending on the actual mix of audience, subscription, collection and funding type.
This is not to say that academic libraries are not interested in improving user experience at all. But it’s just different. Unlike public libraries, academic libraries don’t have to attract new customers with staff recommendations, themes of the month, etc., because students, teachers and researchers each have their own fairly well described subject areas. They just have to provide them with the right finding aids. And these finding aids do not necessarily have to be provided by the libraries themselves, as long as they do offer their patrons efficient delivery mechanisms.
Of course all types of libraries can learn and benefit from each other’s work and even cooperate. After all, good data structures and relations are indispensable for an optimal user experience.
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Just in time or just in case?
Posted on October 16th, 2009 7 commentsMetasearch vs. harvesting & indexing
The other day I gave a presentation for the Assembly of members of the local Amsterdam Libraries Association “Adamnet“, about the Amsterdam Digital Library search portal that we host at the Library of the University of Amsterdam. This portal is built with our MetaLib metasearch tool and offers simultaneous access to, at the moment, 20 local library catalogues.
A large part of this presentation was dedicated to all possible (and very real) technical bottlenecks of this set-up, with the objective of improving coordination and communication between the remote system administrators at the participating libraries and the central portal administration. All MetaLib database connectors/configurations are “home-made”, and the portal highly depends on the availability of the remote cataloging systems.
I took the opportunity to explain to my audience also the “issues” inherent in the concept of metasearch (or “federated search“, “distributed search“, etc.), and compare that to the harvesting & indexing scenario.
Because it was not the first (nor last) time that I had to explain the peculiarities of metasearch, I decided to take the Metasearch vs. Harvesting & Indexing part of the presentation and extend it to a dedicated slideshow. You can see it here, and you are free to use it. Examples/screenshots are taken from our MetaLib Amsterdam Digital Library portal. But everything said applies to other metasearch tools as well, like Webfeat, Muse Global, 360-Search, etc.
The slideshow is meant to be an objective comparison of the two search concepts. I am not saying that Metasearch is bad, and H&I is good, that would be too easy. Some five years ago Metasearch was the best we had, it was a tremendous progress beyond searching numerous individual databases separately. Since then we have seen the emergence of harvesting & indexing tools, combined with “uniform discovery interfaces”, such as Aquabrowser, Primo, Encore, and the OpenSource tools VuFind, SUMMA, Meresco, to name a few.
Anyway, we can compare the main difference between Metasearch and H&I to the concepts “Just in time” and “Just in case“, used in logistics and inventory management.
With Metasearch, records are fetched on request (Just in time), with the risk of running into logistics and delivery problems. With H&I, all available records are already there (Just in case), but maybe not the most recent ones.
Objectively of course, H&I can solve the problems inherent in Metasearch, and therefore is a superior solution. However, a number of institutions, mainly general academic libraries, will for some time depend on databases that can’t be harvested because of technical, legal or commercial reasons.
In other cases, H&I is the best option, for instance in the case of cooperating local or regional libraries, such as Adamnet, or dedicated academic or research libraries that only depend on a limited number of important databases and catalogs.
But I also believe that the real power of H&I can only be taken advantage of, if institutions cooperate and maintain shared central indexes, instead of building each their own redundant metadata stores. This already happens, for instance in Denmark, where the Royal Library uses Primo to access the national DADS database.
We also see commercial hosted H&I initiatives implemented as SaaS (Software as a Service) by both tool vendors and database suppliers, like Ex Libris’ PrimoCentral, SerialSolutions’ Summon and EBSCOhost Integrated Search.
The funny thing is, that if you want to take advantage of all these hosted harvested indexes, you are likely to end up with a hybrid kind of metasearch situation where you distribute searches to a number of remote H&I databases.
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Social networking high and low of the year
Posted on December 16th, 2008 1 commentLast month the Dutch Advisory Committee on Library Innovation published its report “Innovation with Effect“. The report was commissioned by the Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science, the charge was to draw up a plan for library innovation for the period 2009-2012 including a number of required conditions. Priorities that had to be addressed were: provision of digital services, collection policy, marketing, HRM.
The recommendations of the committee are classified in three main areas or “programmatic lines” under a more or less central direction and/or coordination:- Digital infrastructure (such as: one common information architecture, connection to nationwide and global information infrastructure, one national identity management system)
- Innovation of digital services and products
- Policy innovation
Interesting report, but that is not what I want to point out here. What is very exciting: in the list of consulted sources, amidst official reports and publications, appears the social information professionals network Bibliotheek 2.0, the Dutch equivalent of http://library20.ning.com. This aroused much enthusiasm among the members of the Dutch library blogosphere.
The Committee’s chairperson Josje Calff, deputy director of Leiden University Library, had started a discussion on the topic “One public library catalogue?” in this community, to which I am proud to say I also made a small contribution. The results of this discussion have been used by the committee in formulating their recommendations.
In striking contrast to this success for web 2.0 social networking, there was a lot of outrage in the same Dutch library blogosphere last week about the ban of The Netherlands most popular social network Hyves and YouTube from one of the countries institutes for professional and adult education, reported on by one of its employees (in Dutch). Because of all the protests the school’s management is currently reconsidering their position and a new decision will be made beginning of 2009. Probably YouTube will continue to be permitted, because it is heavily used as a source of information in the lessons.
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