Keeping Current, Keeping Alert

Taught an updated Keeping Current, Keeping Alert class–here is the presentation:

Other things I mentioned:

Link to handout: http://library.rice.edu/services/dmc/services/training-material

The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/

Journal Citation Reports http://ezproxy.rice.edu/login?url=http://isiknowledge.com/jcr  

Forming a holistic User Experience

For many people, when they first hear that I am the User Experience librarian, they think, oh, she does usability. Or, oh, she is like Steven Bell, and she is interested in  creating compelling experiences and designing great customer service. Yes, yes, and one more!

For me, User Experience means creating a holistic picture for the user from these three components:

1)Librarians and IT doing usability together. No more silos. And no more not doing usability testing before we hand a product over to users. I read Aaron Schmidt, white papers from Human Factors International, and attend webinars from the Usability Professionals’ Association. I recently started a caucus in SLA.

2)Research-based librarianship. The medical librarians have had this right for a long time. Anthropologists can lead us to a wonderful ethnographic practice in libraries.  I love Nancy Foster, Andrew Asher, and Sharon Traweek. Dr. Traweek is an anthropologist that studies scientists, and does great research.  I have done a handful of studies at my library over the past year, and am currently leading a team of 13 to interview around 25 subjects. We are looking at their flow of research, from the generation of an idea to gathering information, grant applications, evaluating information, writing, organizing, publishing/sharing/presentation, archiving, citing, and protecting intellectual content. I love looking at all of these things, and seeing how the library can work to make things amazing for our users. Or at least better.

3)Compelling experiences. Steven Bell and Brian Mathews are great. By the way, Brian’s blog has moved over the Chronicle of Higher Education. How cool is that! So, in the library, how can we create compelling experiences for our users?

So, my vision of user experience includes these three very important components–and all of them are deeply needed to work together to gather information, and offer results for our users, in a very compelling holistic way.

Data Issue of Science, February 2011

It has been a few months, but I wanted to review this: 

Explore the word cloud (PDF, 11 Mb)

In the 11 February 2011 issue, Science joined with colleagues from Science Signaling, Science Translational Medicine, and Science Careers to provide a broad look at the issues surrounding the huge issue of research data. This collection of articles highlights both the challenges posed by the data deluge and the opportunities that can be realized if we can better organize and access the data.

If you are on the Rice campus, access is here.

Science is making access to this entire collection FREE (simple registration is required for non-subscribers).

SWOT- A simple assessment tool

I attended a great class at SLA on doing business analysis–one of the most useful tools was the SWOT analysis. In the context of the class, it was to look at doing the analysis of a company, but it is useful for many projects, maybe especially in the context of library services.

SWOT

Strengths: What does an organization already do well? *understand attributes What resources do they have?
What does an organization already have that will help them succeed * Are they innovating in ways that others are not?

Weaknesses: What is not helpful/or even harmful? It is more interesting to see where business is failing * What resource is the company lacking? *Low employee morale? Strategic blunders? Are they in the right segments? Are they missing trends?

Opportunities:  What factors are being driven by external factors? What is the competitive landscape and how are the peers? How is the market share changing?

Disruptions: Threats? What is coming down the pipe that could be negative? Where are the competitors succeeding? What is the company missing? How can the economy affect the company? Who are the big customers? Are they balanced?