userslib.com

Here you go, just in time for Black Friday - lots of gift ideas for you or the librarian in your life.

Library inspired book plates	kateblack’s Reading is Sexy badge
Library Card Journals (via Indie Fixx)	BiblioGifts (many lovely products)
AliciaBock’s “the Library”	Jillian Ditner’s “Out of Circulation” print series
Threadless T-shirt “November Was a Good Month”	Library Date Due Stamp T-Shirt
Elfrida’s Library Catalog print	Sarahkat’s Specs Moleskine Notebook

And even more by me!

Here’s a cool video of paper prototyping in action (minus the tedious bits). The device being tested is a PDA for meeting new people.

{ found via www.guuui.com }

The University of Michigan’s Human Factors and Ergonomics Society recently announced the winners of their Bad Designs on Campus Contest.

Since these folks are from the engineering department it’s no surprise that many of the submissions were for bad design on North Campus - specifically the Duderstadt Center and Pierpont Commons. I worked in the Duderstadt Center for 4 years so I can personally attest to how frustrating some of the entries really are. I don’t think I ever went to the library stacks area without having to help someone figure out how to move the compact shelving or made it to the bathroom without having the external doors open unnecessarily.

{ link to contest | found via Field Guide }

Our web team and I recently did a survey to better understand our University of Michigan library patrons – their web use, their library use, and their perceptions of the library. It was mostly successful in that now we have more information about our users than we did before. As with all usability/survey studies, the results merely provide a window into understanding our users. The things we learned in this survey can now be used in conjunction with other studies and log analysis to form a more complete picture. This is just a preliminary report… A full analysis will be put online at some point in the near future. We also plan to do a version of this survey annually - so we will also be assessing the survey itself to determine what worked or didn’t.

[Library Web Survey Fall 2007 Results & Preliminary Analysis]

Paul Courant, economics professor, former provost, and currently the University Librarian at the University of Michigan has just started a new blog Au Courant. His first post is about the UM’s relationship with Google and addresses some of the project’s recent criticisms. Welcome Paul!