userslib.com

Over at the Information Wants To Be Free blog, Meredith Farkas has compiled the results from her 2nd survey about librarians and their blogging habits.

She’ll be releasing it in chunks, the first being the results of the demographic section:
[link]

Here are the bits I found most interesting:
Of those who responded to the survey…

• The largest demographic group for age is 31-40
• The largest demographic group for job type is reference
• The largest demographic group for type of institution is large academic libraries (with large public libraries a close second)
• The largest demographic group for gender is women, but according to Meredith
  

  Women are definitely better represented in the blogopshere than they were last time, but men still are more likely to blog in proportion to their representation in the general population of librarians.

Oh my. School will be starting next week. Ann Arbor is already crawling.

A couple of months ago I wrote a “Who are we dealing with” post to describe these new academic users/patrons in an attempt to better understand them. Beloit College also regularly publishes a rather extensive list of tidbits about our new first year students. And Jenny at the Shifted Librarian has just added some great and more techy examples.

Here are a few of the tidbits I came up with (link to full post):

• They were born in 1989
• They’ve (more or less) always known the internet, home computers and graphical user interfaces, and mobile phones.
• They were newborns when the first episode of The Simpsons aired, they were 3yrs old when the first episode of MTV’s The Real World aired
• They were 4yrs old when Schindler’s List won an Oscar for best picture, they were 10 when they saw their first Star Wars movie.
• They were newborns when the Berlin wall fell, 5yrs old during the OJ Simpson murder trial, and 12yrs old on Sept. 11, 2001

Here are a few of Jenny’s (link to her full post):

• They have always had to narrow down search results (rather than expand them).
• They have never started a search at an “advanced” screen.
• They store information and documents on keychains.
• They have always copied and pasted.
• “.” is pronounced “dot,” not “period.”

And now, a few from Berloit (link to full list):

• Nelson Mandela has always been free and a force in South Africa.
• “Off the hook” has never had anything to do with a telephone.
• Stadiums, rock tours and sporting events have always had corporate names.
• Women’s studies majors have always been offered on campus.
• Tiananmen Square is a 2008 Olympics venue, not the scene of a massacre.

Are you ready?

Sorry for the delay – here are some of my notes from last Tuesday’s MLibrary2.0 Gaming session.

Eli Neiburger: Gaming in the Library?

Eli is from the Ann Arbor District Library and you can find his presentation here.

Eli did an excellent job of describing and putting gamers in context. I think it’s an interesting area that is often overlooked when we think about what activities our patrons (and future patrons) are interested in and how we might use those interests to promote the library.

“Email is how you talk to old people” – AADL gamer

According the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the second most popular activity of those polled (ages 12-17) was gaming at 81%. [I also just came across this Trendspotting blog entry: 1 out of 4 online users are online game players: facts you should know so I think its quite clear that this is an area we ought to pay more attention to.]

• Gamers are very accustomed to dealing with complex interfaces like those used in online role playing games like World of Warcraft. They expect ubiquity. They expect everything to do everything – from water fountains to websites and wifi.
• Content from peers has a higher value than anything else. “Authority” has spent their authoritative capital.
• There are games that some faculty are starting to take an interest in as tools for learning. For example, SimCity and Civilization can be used to teach history, economics, city planning, etc.
• In a study by OCLC: College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources, Libraries were rated more trustworthy and accurate than search engines but search engines were rated much higher than Libraries as being more convienient, easy to use, cost effective, reliable and fast. [oh my!]
• Establishing the Library as Third Place. Eric Frierson goes into some detail on this as well as the event in general.
• The Ann Arbor District Library has a blog on it’s front page to share info from the Director, about events, programs, and the collection. Eli said one of the great things about this is that it acts as a sort of focus group because they can get immediate feedback about what’s going on via patron comments.

Jane Blumenthol – Second Life

Jane is the Director of the University of Michigan Health Sciences Libraries where they are working on extensive plans to use Second Life in conjunction with the Medical School. They are planning a whole campus for medical school related events. There will be 3-D models that can be explored and simulations of patient consultations so med school students will have an additional way to practice their bedside mannor.

Her presentation isn’t available online yet, but see her del.icio.us account for many Second Life related links.

Lisa Hinchliffe

Lisa Head of the U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Undergraduate Library and spoke about Library 2.0 initiatives. I found this to be an especially inspirational talk because she talked about the technology and being brave, passionate, decisive (just do it!), willing to change your mind, attaining a state of continuous evolution, funding the future, and saying “yes.”
UIUL developed a browser search bar for their catalog, website, and google. They were the first to develop a Facebook app for searching their opac, and they feed their twitter and various blogs into the library’s home page. They circulate games and hold tournaments.

Lisa also gave some great advice for when dealing with innovation: be careful not to put too much importance measuring success. It doesn’t operate like it might with circ & reference stats. Sometimes just trying something new is successful.

There’s a recent trend at our library: non-public service librarians volunteering to do reference. I think this is great! Since my “Interface & User Testing Specialist” position is a primarily HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) based job and doesn’t include any reference duties, I started volunteering a couple of semesters ago. Because it’s part of my job to understand library users – what better way to do that than to spend a couple hours a week helping patrons navigate the tons of resources available to them. Its one thing to look at an online resource and declare “this is so not intuitive!” and another thing to have to repeatedly try to explain to patrons the 20 steps required to find what they want. I feel very lucky to be in a position where I have the opportunity to interact directly with our users outside of an official usability context.

So back to the title of this post. Periodically the idea that librarians are going to become obsolete reemerges. Right, everything is going to be online and fully searchable. But there’s going to be exponentially more information every year. And much of this information will remain proprietary and subscription based. Of course I’m a big proponent of having easy to use interfaces, but interfaces are only useful if they themselves can be found. This is where librarians come in. They are the sifters, funnels, aggregators, and above all mediators between the people and the technology.

I (with help from some others) am planning on polling University of Michigan Library users about what library resources they use, what web 2.0 resources they use (and how often), and their perception of the library’s online resources. Does anyone have any suggestions for questions they think would be interesting to include?

A recent British Poll asked internet users about their most hated web terms. Unfortunately, the actual survey report is no where to be found but according to the Communication Overtones blog, the top 10 hated words are (in no order): Folksonomy, Blogosphere, Blog, Netiquette, Blook, Webinar, Vlog, Social Networking, Cookie, and Wiki.

Topping the list of words most likely to make web users “wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard” was folksonomy, a term for a web classification system.

Yahoo Article

I met my first incoming freshman last week. I was struck by her confidence and maturity. And along with all this library2.0 talk I thought it’d be interesting to look at some user research for both internet users in general as well as college students.

From what I can tell, here’s how the demographics/labels break down:

• Baby Boomers: born in the 1940’s – 1960’s
• Generation X: born in the 1960’s – 1981 (give or take)
• Generation Y (aka “The Millenials,” “The Internet Generation,” “Generation Next,” etc.): born 1982-2000

And just so you don’t have to do any math, here are some tidbits about the incoming college freshmen class of 2011:

• They were born in 1989
• They’ve (more or less) always known the internet, home computers and graphical user interfaces, and mobile phones.
• They were newborns when the first episode of The Simpsons aired, they were 3yrs old when the first episode of MTV’s The Real World aired
• They were 4yrs old when Schindler’s List won an Oscar for best picture, they were 10 when they saw their first Star Wars movie.
• They were newborns when the Berlin wall fell, 5yrs old during the OJ Simpson murder trial, and 12yrs old on Sept. 11, 2001

Here are some great articles & studies:

Tagging Play: Forget Dewey and His Decimals, Internet Users Are Revolutionizing the Way We Classify Information – and Make Sense of It by Lee Rainie, Director, Pew Internet and American Life Project January 31, 200. Link

• According to this Pew study, 27% of internet user have tagged or categorized content online. Services like flickr & delicious are still quickly growing in popularity.
• This article also includes a nice short interview with David Weinberger about the power of tagging.

A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users by John B. Horrigan, Associate Director for Research, Pew Internet & American Life Project May 7, 2007. Link

• Those surveyed are broken into user type groups to describe their feelings and behavior relating to technology (Omnivores, Connectors, Lackluster Vets, Productivity Enhancers, Mobile Centrics, Connected but Hassled…) I think this is a cool way to distinguish user types other than the typical “expert or novice”
• 37% of internet users generate content (blog, share photos, share videos, post comments, create websites, etc.)
• 41% send text messages on their mobile phone
  

A Portrait of “Generation Next” How Young People View Their Lives, Futures and Politics from the Pew Research Center Released: January 9, 2007. Link

Survey respondents ages 18-25:

• Said that they use a social networking website (54%)
• Said that in the last 24 hours they had:
  • sent/received email (50%)
  • sent/received text message on mobile phone (51%)
  • sent/received instant message (29%)

Born with the Chip: The next generation will profoundly impact both library service and the culture within the profession by Stephen Abram & Judy Luther — Library Journal, 5/1/2004. Link

• The Millenials know Google and expect everything to be as simple as Google. Our recent attempts at federated searching are a good start, but it’s still way too complicated! How are they supposed to know when to search the library website, the OPAC, eJournals list, or the federated article engine?
• The Millenials communicate constantly. Many of them have or use laptops, pda’s, mp3 players, cell phones, blackberries, IM, profiles on social networking sites, etc. I’m not sure they want us there (or know they want us there), but we might want to be there just in case.
• Content and technology are inseparable. Millenials have grown up communicating on the web (blogs, chatrooms, IM, email) and they equate technology with information.
  

College Students Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources, Online Computer Library Center, 2006. Link

• 87% of college students have been to a college library in person, and 61% of college students surveyed have used a library Web site.
• 2% of students selected Library websites as the source used to begin an information search.
• 52% of college students responded that the quality of assistance they received from the librarian was the same as the search engine.
• 87% are aware that their library has a library Web site, 86% an online library catalog, and 71% online reference materials. 47% are aware their library has electronic books, 45% are aware that it has an online librarian question service, and 62% are aware that it has electronic periodicals and online databases

More Resources & Links

• Trendspotting blog: market and user research
• Convenience, Communications, and Control: How Students Use Technology by Robert B. Kvavik — Educause
• Wikipedia article on Generation Y
• Higher Education Research Institute’s The American Freshman – National Norms for 2006