The Quantum Archivist

Penrose Library's new web site

Recently, the Penrose Library launched a brand new “user-centered” web site. I’m not a big fan of the term “user centered” since I think it is often used as an excuse not to be creative. But what we are trying to do is make available to each group of users the things that they are most interested in right up front. Rather than forcing them to learn how the library is organized administratively, we wanted the site to answer the question: “What do I want to do?” based on a second question:  “Who wants to know?”

Some of this approach was informed by a workshop given by Nancy Fried Foster, library anthropologist at the University of Rochester, that some of us attended a year or so ago. She had recently completed an ethnographic study of undergraduate research behavior at the University of Rochester. Her findings were published in 2007 in a book called “Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester.”

Other parts of the design were informed by our own observations of user behaviors from Faculty, Students (both graduate and undergraduate) and University staff. If you are interested, there is a short “tour” of the new site, narrated by our Instruction Librarian, Carrie Forbes.

My point is really that, in order to be successful, especially in a library that hopes to teach research and scholarship skills as well as provide information, one size does not fit all, and there should be as many different library experiences as there are groups we wish to serve. Our next step is to extend the granularity of experience down to the individual, and provide each person (or at least each person who is affiliated with DU) with a experience that is tailored to his or her own interests and experience. I mean, if Amazon and L.L. Bean can do it, why can’t a library?