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NFAIS Workshop

Written on: May 15th, 2010 in Blog Posts

Division of Libraries staff attended a recent workshop in Philadelphia hosted by Lyrasis and NFAIS, the National Federation of Advanced Information Services. The workshop looked at how publishers and librarians can leverage technology to improve their users’ search experience, and how to design their services to optimize discovery and usability.

The first presentation was by Cody Hanson, technology librarian at U. of Minnesota, who discussed a recent project on Discoverability, an effort to identify trends in user discovery behavior which would enable the school to support new technology initiatives.
The project’s main question was “how can we make relevant resources more visible and easy to find?”. Their final report can be read in full here, but Cody was kind enough to break down the major findings for the attendees. A literature review and other research on how their own users interacted with the school’s online services outlined the main current discovery trends that needed to be placed at the forefront of institutional strategy:

• Users are discovering relevant information outside of traditional library systems- they’re not starting with library resources and the traditional library catalog. The recent Ithaka study also identified this as the most significant issues facing research and academic libraries.
• Users expect discovery and delivery to coincide- it’s no longer sufficient to just be told by a library service that a resource exists- people expect that when they find what they want, they have what they want
• Discovery increasingly happens through recommending- going beyond traditional book reviews and citations, users are now increasingly looking to recommendations gathered through social networking, link sharing, and reviews generated through algorithms connecting purchases with similiar purchases by others
• Our users increasingly rely on “nontraditional information objects”: that is to say, youtube videos, social network conversations, wikis and other ephemeral and transitional artifacts.
• User of portable internet-capable devices is expanding.

More discussion of this and other presentations below the fold…
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