Embracing an Ethnographic Agenda: Context, Collaboration, and Complexity

Abstract

Modern library services can be incredibly complex. Much more so than their forebears, modern librarians must grapple daily with questions of how best to implement innovative new services, while also maintaining and updating the old. The efforts undertaken are immense, but how best to evaluate their success?In this groundbreaking new book from Routledge, library practitioners, anthropologists, and design experts combine to advocate a new focus on User Experience (or 'UX') research methods. Through a combination of theoretical discussion and applied case studies, they argue that this ethnographic and humancentred design approach enables library professionals to gather rich evidencebased insights into what is really going on in their libraries, allowing them to look beyond what library users say they do to what they actually do.Edited by the team behind the international UX in Libraries conference, User Experience in Libraries will ignite new interest in a rapidly emerging and gamechanging area of research. Clearly written and passionately argued, it is essential reading for all library professionals and students of Library and Information Science. It will also be welcomed by anthropologists and design professionals working in related fi elds.Andy Priestner manages Cambridge University's pioneering FutureLib innovation programme, employing user experience and design thinking to develop new library services across the university. He is the founder of the UX in Libraries Conference and provides training and consultancy on the subject to institutions across Europe.Matt Borg was an academic librarian at Sheffi eld Hallam University for fourteen years, during which time he was responsible for a new research-based approach to user experience. He is now a Solutions Expert at ProQuest's Ex Libris, where he works to bring new technology to libraries across Europe, as well as a freelance trainer in UX techniques.

Making Space for the ‘Irrational’ Practice of Anthropology in Libraries

“…Libraries and librarianship emerge from particular institutions and structures of power: whiteness (Ettarh 2018;Hathcock 2015;Hudson 2017), heterosexual gender hegemony (Schlesselman-Tarango 2016), middle-classness (Garrison 2003), and capitalism (Midbon 1980). Libraries are artifacts, are institutions, are cultural constructions that reflect and are shaped by the cultures in which they exist (Brown and Davis-Brown 1998;Lanclos 2016). As such, they are not immune to the problems that emerge from society.…”

Using ethnographic research techniques to find out the story behind international student library usage in the Library Impact Data Project

“…To find out how library users truly interact with the library, using ethnographic research tools with its behaviour research methods can shed light on how people are truly using library services (Schmidt and Etches, 2014). Lanclos (2016) claims ethnographic practices help with "...eliciting qualitative data about user behaviour, and more importantly as an avenue to transforming institutional practice and in increasing the role of library voices in shaping such practices" (p.21). She makes the case for libraries employing ethnographers or anthropologists as permanent members of staff rather than bringing them in as consultants for a short term project where because they are paid by the organisation may be under pressure to please the purse holders.…”

“…Staff have to fit it in and around their existing day job. If libraries wants to see the full benefit and gain this detailed information about their users' experience, then such research practices should as Lanclos (2016) asserts be embedded with the library team with an accompanying resource allocation.…”