I just finished reading Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester. Anyone who provides library services to young people needs to read this. I also recommended it to our director of the writing center since much of the research includes how students write papers and what faculty expect in a paper. One particularly apt statement on finding out what users need is “Don’t guess, just ask.” You can download it here.
http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/downloadables/downloads.cfm
One of the interesting things they learned was that students want the library web site to be a customizable portal . A number of university libraries tried this some years back and abandoned it for lack of interest. Perhaps what’s changed since then is the availability of more interactive widgets and the request for personal customization, such as adding the student’s own classes, exam schedules and such. UR ended up sending this insight to their university IT department where they are working on such a portal.
There’s a lot of information here that can inform the work of web designers. You should read it for yourself and send the URL to others in your library or university. It’s definitely worth reading.
1 Comment
October 18, 2007 at 7:35 am
Thanks for the nice comments!