Monthly Archives: May 2012

Source of Information for Understanding Your Academic Library Users

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As a user experience librarian, I need to make sure that I am considering all the sources of information that will help me better understand our students and faculty as library users. I want as much as possible to make keep in mind the mantra that “the user is not me.”

As an exercise in making a list of the main ways that I can learn about our users in the college library where I work, I put together this little mindmap that delineates between those sources where we are actively soliciting responses from our users and those sources where were are sifting through the traces of the users’ interactions with our services and systems. Did I miss anything important?

Testing Embedded LibGuides Content on External Sites

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At my library, we’re thinking of using LibGuides to manage our database lists for the redesigned library website. I’m just experimenting here to see how well the API from LibGuides works that lets you publish a box from a LibGuide on an external website. Currently, we use a homegrown database to manage the display of databases in A-Z and subject breakdowns on the library site. We also use LibGuides for the usual kinds of subject guides. To help my colleagues who make LibGuides feel confident that the database links they use are the latest ones, I have a privately published LibGuide that maintains a canonical set of URLs. When librarians create new LibGuides and want to link to a given database, they don’t have to copy and paste URLs; instead, they can create a link that has a URL that is mapped to the canonical one. If I have to update the canonical URL in LibGuides, then all the LibGuides that use that mapped URL will automatically get updated with the latest URL.

With no effort to customize the look of this box from my philosophy subject guide, here’s a box republished via API: