Whether marketing and training events or ‘behind the scenes’ analysis projects, collaborations of all shapes and sizes can benefit librarians and vendors alike. Hear specific examples from both sides, including past success stories and areas of opportunity in 2015. Each example will include background information, goals, and lessons learned. Audience members will have the chance to share their own thoughts and personal experiences.
Learning objectives: Hear specific examples of collaborative events and projects from the perspective of both a librarian at a large university and a major STM publisher. Discover how both sides can benefit by maximizing the resources available in each other.
Join EBSCO for a luncheon at ER&L to hear more about The Future of Discovery!
More details to follow!
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Come meet SCELC and TexShare at ER&L! SCELC is hosting a meet-up with Texas librarians so you can learn more about the growing SCELC-TexShare partnership, and the licensing opportunities afforded by the efforts of two consortia working together.
Texas libraries have expanded choices for licensing electronic content through the SCELC-TexShare partnership. SCELC provides its licensing and other services to academic and nonprofit research libraries to Texas eligible libraries. SCELC and TexShare staff want to talk with you about enhancing your library acquisitions strategy in electronic resources. SCELC specializes in providing access to unique consortial offers for e-journals, ebooks, databases and more. If you are a librarian please drop in and visit. (And if you can't make it the meet-up, be sure to visit the SCELC table at the Vendor Reception & Tabletop Exhibits Monday evening!)
The Association of Research Libraries has stated that a “collaborative future for collections” is crucial to ensuring the continued growth of libraries’ print and digital collections. Shared Shelf, Artstor’s web-based digital media management system, was created to allow librarians to easily collaborate with faculty, students and peers at their own and other institutions to build and manage collections of varied scope, media type, and subject focus.
This session will introduce Shared Shelf and highlight the work of librarians who use the platform to successfully engage users in hands-on collection building and collaborative cataloging. Speakers will discuss how they facilitate collaboration, ways to build partnerships with their users, as well as the tools that can be harnessed to support these processes.
The use cases presented are intended to prompt attendees to consider the ways in which they might develop collaborative collection building efforts on their own campuses.
Oxford University Press is at the early stages of a major initiative to transform its approach to reference publishing in order to better serve the changing needs of university-level digital research. Updated monthly, peer-reviewed, and highly discoverable, the Oxford Research Encyclopedias will provide the necessary grounding for the start of advanced research and will serve as living reference works—mapping the entirety of a field of study as the field evolves. Each ORE module will experience an extensive free-access period, as the article collections grow to a substantial volume.
As Oxford editors begin to commission in-depth, born-digital articles across 20 disciplines (including American History, Environmental Science, Politics, and more), core questions are being raised regarding online access to academic content. Jennifer Wilson, Digital Publishing Analyst and Rebecca Seger, Director of Institutional Sales will explain the ORE mission, provide an update on the program’s process, and lead a discussion about the future of the project.
ER&L is streaming the ACRL Fair Use Week Webcast. Details from ACRL included below, full details here.
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Join us for the free ACRL Presents webcast, “Celebrating Fair Use Week: Does Fair Use Really Work?,” on Tuesday, February 24, 2015, from 1:00 — 2:00 p.m. Central time. Fair use seems obscure and difficult to many. Especially after the Appeals Court ruling in the Georgia State case, we may find ourselves wondering if it is really a workable approach to balancing the rights of creators with socially desirable uses. Yet many other countries are seeking to emulate what they see as the benefits of fair use. In this webinar, we will try to unwind some of the complexity of fair use. We will consider the role of context in making fair use decisions and suggest strategies for deciding when to turn to fair use and how to think through the analysis.
Learning outcomes:
Presenter: Kevin Smith, Director, Copyright & Scholarly Communication, Duke University Libraries
More details about Fair Use Week, February 23-27, 2015, are available online.
With the incredible growth of the Internet, social media and mobile device usage, the amount of digital information has exploded in recent years while demands for instant access to e-resources continue to grow. It’s not an easy problem for libraries to solve using fragmented e-resource management solutions and multiple spreadsheets.
OCLC offers tools and services – many included in OCLC Cataloging, Interlibrary Loan and WorldCat Discovery subscriptions – that help libraries solve the e-resource management puzzle, so you can put electronic materials in the hands of your users fast.
In this session, you will learn how to leverage existing OCLC subscriptions with quality metadata that is cooperatively managed in the WorldCat database and the WorldCat knowledge base to:
1) Help users:
2) Help libraries:
Pick and choose which pieces you need to solve your e-resource management puzzle. Join us to learn more.
The American Psychological Association (APA) is organizing a focus group session that will take place during the Electronic Resources & Libraries 2015 meeting. We are looking for attendees who can talk with us about their institutions’ electronic resource management and the technical infrastructure they support. We’re also interested in learning about your technical challenges and the key things you look for in a vendor relationship.
Honorarium: $25 gift card per participant
If you would like to participate, please provide contact information including your title and institution. We’d appreciate it if you’d let us know of your interest as soon as possible.
Please reply to Anne Breitenbach at abreitenbach@apa.org
Additional details and preparatory materials will be provided to participants closer to the date.
Librarians and library staff are welcome to join us as we celebrate 50 years of independent, academic publishing for SAGE at the 10th anniversary ER&L Conference.
Food & Drink will be provided!
RSVP now: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/sage-anniversary-reception-at-erl-registration-15657127891
No matter what your job or mission in life: if you are working with other people you are dealing with information architecture. Information Architecture is the way that we arrange the parts of something to make it understandable. Whether it is determining the labels for your products and services or creating navigational systems to help users move through a complex ecosystem of marketing channels, everybody architects information.
The concepts one has to understand to practice information architecture thoughtfully are not hard to learn or based on expensive tools. In fact they are tools and concepts we at the Information Architecture Institute think everybody should know. This half day workshop is meant to introduce the concepts of IA and give you confidence in practicing IA yourself.
The workshop is divided into three main lessons that each have lecture and workshop components:
This is part of the Designing for Digital Conference. Learn more at www.designingfordigital.com.
"Easy to use" and "user friendly" have become part of our cultural vocabulary. For customers, these concepts represent the lens in which a user experience is evaluated. For business and product owners, these concepts become prioritized goals that are rarely defined and even harder to measure.
In successful digital product companies, Interaction design is used to understand what needs to be created so that users can accomplish their goals in the most "user friendly" manner possible.
While some product teams are fortunate enough to have Interaction Designers - a team member who's role is to understand how users view the world, so that they can create something that helps them achieve a goal- most do not. They rely on existing team members to make smart decisions about what to make and how to make it.
This workshop explores the tools and methodologies of interaction design. As a group we will:
This workshop is open to everyone. It is recommended for those with little to no interaction design experience.
Before the web became interactive, information architecture put UX designers on the map. All those "pages" of static content had to be bucketed, filed, and organized. Information Architecture was our main value-add on the web. Then the web started becoming interactive. People were transacting on the web. Usability, user interfaces, and storyboarding became a new focus. Now projects are not broken down by sections of the IA, they are broken down by task flows (or user stories). But now, in a post-responsive-revolution world, we need to shift our focus again. We need a new paradigm to ensure that we create simple, efficient, and consistent modular systems of dynamic object.
This is part of the Designing for Digital Conference. Learn more at www.designingfordigital.com.
As collections have become predominantly digital, the requirements for managing and providing access to a library’s holdings have changed. As a result, we all know that library workflows must evolve. It is imperative that libraries have the tools to move forward and meet rapidly changing expectations of administration and of your patrons.
Join us for lunch Wednesday, February 25 at Noon to hear about two major initiatives to give you those tools and support this transformation:
To best provide library services that meet user needs, librarians are increasingly asked to follow a formal feedback-gathering process that collects accurate and actionable data to inform decision making. A home-grown survey can be a valuable tool in gathering satisfaction data but poorly constructed survey questions are all too common. Poorly written survey questions not only confuse respondents but also lead to substantial measurement error and misleading results. This half-day workshop will focus on how to construct survey questions that produce meaningful results that are valid and reliable. The instructor will review elements of survey process and introduce different types of survey questions, followed by a class activities to evaluate less-than-ideal survey questions and to develop survey items. This workshop is designed to be a beginner level course for those who are interested in participating assessment activities in libraries and information centers.
Learning Objectives:
• Understand elements of survey process.
• Write effective survey items, using different types of survey questions.
• Evaluate survey content and distinguish between well-written and poorly written survey questions.
This is part of the Designing for Digital Conference. Learn more at www.designingfordigital.com.
Most digital products no longer exist as a contained product offering - i.e. a tool that accomplishes a finite set of predetermined tasks. Today’s digital products are connected. They manifest across multiple touch-points (mobile, tablet, web, in-person, etc..) and their interactions evolve with the user over time.
Thanks to product offerings from companies like Google, Amazon and Apple; our expectations of business who create digital products have also changed. We expect these experiences to be interconnected; where my calendar is aware of events that appear in my email, or my eReader automatically displays purchases made via my phone. Today’s digital products behave more like services - fluid experiences that manifest across multiple touch-points over time.
This demand for a seamless user experience is also changing the way business and product managers develop products. In order to develop meaningful, long-term relationships with their customers, they are forced to work across previously isolated teams and business units. Not only does this present a challenge for those who try, but most organizations quickly realize they lack the capability to even define their service offering, let alone the expertise to craft and maintain it.
Business and product managers must rethink their approach toward developing products & services that support meaningful user experiences. They must reframe their disconnected touch-points into a single connected service offering.
This workshop outlines an advanced approach to defining, crafting, and refining a service offering that manifests across a series of diverse touch-points. In this workshop, we will:
While this workshop is open to everyone, people with design or product management experience are encouraged.
Participants will walk away with a basic understanding of customer journey mapping and service blue printing; two methodologies integral to the creation of a seamless service experience.
This is part of the Designing for Digital Conference. Learn more at www.designingfordigital.com.
The last decade has been one of rapid change for libraries as we attempt to keep up with the ever-changing needs and demands of users. Making it even more daunting are the diverse service needs and expectations of students and faculty in various disciplines. In this climate of constant change, understanding user experience with new services and technologies is critical. According to ISO 9241-210,2010 standards, user experience is defined as “a person's perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service.” Within the context of libraries, user experience focuses on the user’s feelings while using library collections, discovery tools, or services, and it is influenced by the expectations and experiences of the user. Successful system and service design that meets user expectations depend on an organizational commitment to user-focused design, data-driven decision making, and communication. The 2010- 2013 Columbia University Libraries/Information Services (CUL/IS) Strategic Plan explicitly called for the Libraries work to be guided by user- focused design and data-driven decision making: “In the years ahead, the work of CUL/IS will be guided by [the following principles]: user-focused design, data-driven decision making, continuous assessment of results, and flexible and adaptive response to user needs.” As has been the case with our counterparts across the nation, we have made great strides in each of these areas included in the strategic plan to better understand our users’ experiences and expectations. This talk presents a sample of the types of user experience projects that we have completed in the last two years. Highlights include five projects, each utilizing a different method, that led to changes in the platforms used to deliver digital services and collections as well as changes in how we staff these services:
- Usability testing of Libraries discovery tool and website
- Exploiting Google Analytics data to improve Libraries discovery tool and website
- Interviews and focus groups to understand eBook usage and perceptions
- Observation studies to advance our understanding of user interactions with library environment and technology
This is part of the Designing for Digital Conference. Learn more at www.designingfordigital.com.
Like any large structure, the process of building a library website starts long before the first line of code is written: budgets, RFPs, timelines, identifying (and balancing) the needs and preferences of diverse stakeholders, representing complex services and structures -- and all in a design that pleases everyone and complies with brand standards. How do we ensure that overarching concerns like user experience, content strategy and governance, and accessibility don’t simply fall by the wayside as the project progresses? In this session, Courtney Greene McDonald, Head of Discovery & Research Services at Indiana University Libraries, and Rick Cecil, Director of User Experience at Bluespark Labs share five common challenges experienced in library website redesign projects, with tips and insights drawn from their contrasting perspectives from inside and outside the library. Attendees will come away with processes, techniques and methodologies to tackle these common challenges, even before the first wireframe is sketched.
This is part of the Designing for Digital Conference. Learn more at www.designingfordigital.com.
This is part of the Designing for Digital Conference. Learn more at www.designingfordigital.com.
Fast Talks: UX Projects & Research
This 45-minute session allows for 10 minute Fast Talks on four projects. Find these presenters later in the day to dive into details or ask questions.
1. A Library Catalog UX Study in Preparation for a Website Redesign
Mary Marissen, Collections Specialist, Swarthmore College Library
The consortium of Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr and Haverford College Libraries had plans already in place to engage a web design firm for a catalog redesign, when a Swarthmore alumnus, professional UX consultant and educator, volunteered his expertise to guide a UX study for the site. Under his guidance and with the help of a full-time student intern, we conducted formative user tests to learn how students understand the catalog and navigate searches. We shared our study and resulting recommendations with the design firm, who in conjunction with their own processes, will be ready to unveil the new site design in February 2015.
2. A Design for a Dynamically Sortable, Multi-Attribute E-Resource IndexIn today's fractured e-resource environment, library users often need to search multiple information silos to find the best information. While web-scale discovery has made it easier to search across many resources at once, fulfilling more advanced research needs often requires users to invest significant time and energy searching separate databases. But before selecting a resource to invest in, users first need to be confident it will meet their information needs. Unfortunately, current conventions for presenting e-resources do little to expose subject coverage and explain differences between resources, making it hard for users to make informed choices. Libraries need a way to contextualize e-resource collections to better support decision-making at the critical resource selection stage.
We will discuss a proposed design for a sortable, dynamic e-resource index that would provide contextual cues, helping expose subject coverage and allow users to winnow displayed choices across multiple dimensions related to their information needs. The benefits of this design include helping users make better resource selections and supporting resource discovery using task-based, user-oriented options. This session would demonstrate our design prototype, describe initial findings from user testing, and propose additional steps and potential enhancements to increase the utility and usability of this design.
3. UX @ NYU Libraries: How One Library Department is Incorporating UX Methods for a Better Web PresenceThe plethora of user centered methods can make it hard to determine what approaches fit best when trying to improve library interfaces for users. In this session, you’ll hear about some effective UX methods the User Experience Department at NYU Libraries employs to create a better, more user-friendly web presence. As a small, versatile department, we work with stakeholders from around the university to incorporate user centered methods into agile product design and development.
4. Rinse & Repeat Usability Testing
Marie Maxey, Product Analyst, UX, SAGE Publications
At SAGE we’re experimenting with the ability to use a ‘rinse and repeat’ styled approach to our user testing practice. Our goal is to get better at what we do every time we do it, while keeping our methods flexible and responsive to our products requirements. We’re weighing the costs and benefits of different approaches – when are we best served by classic talk-out-loud usability methods? And when do we need a hybrid test that includes semi-structured interviews at the end? How can we best determine tester proficiency, to help inform our analysis of test results? We’d like to achieve a system that encourages our test participants to ‘come again’ and have a long term relationship with us, with the goal of continuing to recruit new participants to build a community around our products.
This is part of the Designing for Digital Conference. Learn more at www.designingfordigital.com.
This is part of the Designing for Digital Conference. Learn more at www.designingfordigital.com.
This is part of the Designing for Digital Conference. Learn more at www.designingfordigital.com.
Updating an academic library website to current design expectations can involve an enormous amount of time, requiring testing and development in a number of areas that affect the user’s ultimate experience. This session uses the recent update to the [http://www.library.unt.edu UNT Libraries’ website] as a case study in guerrilla tactics, discussing our study of analytics data and peer sites, adoption of the bootstrap library for rapid development, early html prototyping, patron interviews, and good commons sense in our typographic choices and content strategy as we developed both a mobile-responsive site and bento-box style search application. We’ll also take a detour into the world of device-based testing and demonstrate how in-browser testing, paired with a small collection of phones and tablets made troubleshooting the design process far easier, how having these types of devices makes sense as a public service within libraries in general, and some of the new user testing tools/toys we have on hand to bring user testing in the libraries up to a whole new level in the coming months and years.
This is part of the Designing for Digital Conference. Learn more at www.designingfordigital.com.
In Spring 2014, a user experience that was confusing to both library patrons and staff made me begin on the journey to create a UX Team at my university library. I am eager to share what I learned in the form of practical tips and recommendations on that process: from writing the proposal, to getting buy-in, and selecting projects. In addition, I'll share details of an exciting and productive collaboration with a Qualitative Methods class that provided the newly formed UX Team with a rich source of data and a great place to begin.
This is part of the Designing for Digital Conference. Learn more at www.designingfordigital.com.
William Hicks, Assistant Dean for Digital Libraries at UNT Libraries, will bring his portable testing lab to the Designing for Digital Conference for you to test you websites. You will have access to a half-dozen tablets and phones of varying make/OS, Google Glass, littleBits prototyping library.
Andrew Darby, Head of Web & Application Development at the University of Miami Libraries, will lead a brainstorming session and discussion on the creation of an online usability clearinghouse for libraries. A lot of library website UX blocks are practically universal (search boxes, catalogs, news carousels, terminology, etc.), and yet we separately test them over and over. A clearinghouse site would allow one to search thematically (or geographically) and also make the data available for meta analysis. Andrew will help us start the conversation to determine feasibility and possible next steps.
This is part of the Designing for Digital Conference. Learn more at www.designingfordigital.com.
Last year, the New York Public Library established a new department- Department of Digital Experience. With a wide reaching range of services- from cultural programs, education programs, exhibitions, and traditional library services, the NYPL has begun to shape a digital strategy that will serve literacy students, educators, researchers, tourists, families and more. The new department supports existing programs and services, and will explore new opportunities for applications of digital technologies to improve and enhance customer service, program operations, user experience and access to information.
Frank Migliorelli, an experience designer who took the reigns as Director of Digital Experience last July, will talk about the challenges he’s uncovered as this new initiative helps to transform one of the world’s largest library systems. From redeveloping a new website, the approach to digitizing and activating a vast group of collections and archives, and bringing interactive, digital experiences to a traditional artifact-based exhibit program, he’ll share his ideas of creating user experiences that will not only transform NYPL’s on-line world, but also impact and enhance the digital/physical connection between our customers, the famous lion flagship building, the branches, and the NYPL community all over the world.
This is part of the Designing for Digital Conference. Learn more at www.designingfordigital.com.
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