Abstract
Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist at OCLC Research, discussed results of her research of library user information-seeking behavior and user attitudes toward the library. She discovered that while students and researchers are confident in their own ability to find and use information, information literacy has not kept pace with digital literacy and there is a need for education and support. These findings have implications for librarians and the development of library services to make libraries more relevant today.
INTRODUCTION
I am very excited about our research and I hope other people are too. We did get some new funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and we are looking at virtual reference services and how they compare or can actually work with social question and answer services. There will be an announcement next week that the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the United Kingdom has funded the digital visitors and residents project, which is a three-year longitudinal study.Footnote 1 In this project with Oxford University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, we are tracking and following four educational stages. The first stage is for those in their last year of high school and first year of college or university; the second stage includes those in the third and fourth year of college and university; the third stage is the graduate and doctoral students; and the fourth stage includes the scholars.
Today I am going to do a mash-up of all of these, and I have a lot of quotes. I can tell you lots of things, but I think it makes a lot more sense and hits home when I give you the actual quotes from the participants.
I find Google a lot easier than going to the library website because I don't know, it's just like sometimes so many journals come up and when you look at the first ten and they just don't make any sense I, kind of, give up. Google, I don't know. It's just Google it's—I find it easier just to look through anything. (U.S. university student, female, age 19)
THEN AND NOW
It used to be that our users would work around our systems, and now that is not the case. Now we need to build our services and systems to work around their workflow. We give a lot of lip service to it, but I am not sure that we are recognizing and doing anything about it. Resources used to be scarce. Now where did they go? They would come to us in an academic environment because we had what they needed.Footnote 2 We need to be out there and be where our users need us.
It used to be that the information was local; now it is global, we can get information from anywhere. It used to be very linear; now it is more linked. One of my colleagues at Oxford who is not a librarian loves to do these mappings that to me are crazy-making, and he loves them. I am very linear, and I think many of us in this profession are, and that is the way we have organized our information.
TOWARD A PROFILE OF THE RESEARCHER OF TODAY: WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM JISC PROJECTS?
The study that I am pulling from that I had been asked to talk about was the digital information seekers study, and this was the most difficult thing that I have ever done.Footnote 3 ,Footnote 4 I looked at twelve different user behavior studies that were published in the United States and the United Kingdom during a five-year period. I tried to determine all of these common themes. The reason it was so difficult is that we do not all report in the same way. I did not know the n's (the total number of participants), which is something I am a stickler about for much of this research. We tried to pull all of this together and come up with something that really made sense about this picture of the users. We need to understand the motivations and the engagement of our users today. My mother is in retail, and she always says, “One size fits no one.” I think that is the same thing about our services and systems, and it is unfortunate. But we need to be looking at all of these different individuals and their different needs.
HOW INDIVIDUALS WORK
One thing we did learn from all of these studies is that convenience is number one and convenience changes. What is convenient for me right this minute may not be convenient for me two hours from now. That is something that we have forgotten in many of our user behavior studies. Context and situation are very important. If you do not ask those questions, then you are not getting the right answers.
Individuals still value human resources. One of the things that the undergraduates have often said is, “I can text my father, and he'll give me the answer.” When I ask them about their mothers, they will often say, “Yeah, my mother wants to teach me how to find the answer. I don't want that.” We are very interested in instruction, and if they do not want it, they are not going to come to us. They do not want things pushed on them.
Most people are “power browsers” and this was a term used in some of these studies. They scan these small chunks of information, they only view a few pages, and they do not really read everything. Why? Because we have so much information coming at us. I think I have attention deficit disorder these days, because when I try to sit down and read something from cover to cover, it is very difficult. And our users are the same way: they get in, and they get out. When I worked for NetLibrary, I think the average time in an e-book was 11.9 minutes. And the librarians would say to me, “This is wrong. We're encouraging people not to read and get the whole idea.” They are going to do what they are going to do. How do you know they read an entire book? We do not know that they read that entire book in print. We are all behaving in this way today. I always said that NetLibrary should have been a database for reference services, because what do you do? You get in, and you get out.
I talked to you at the Denver conference about the first IMLS study.Footnote 5 We have been asking the same questions since 2003, so I have a lot of longitudinal data at this point. In a focus group interview, the faculty said, “You know, I generally didn't sit back in my chair and just read the journal. I searched maybe sixty journals on two or three topics I'm looking for and want to read about today. I get those topics, and I read the articles on that.” So he is saying, “I skim, and I pick out a few things that I'll read.” What some of the studies have reported is that 60% of e-journal users view less than four pages. You may have data that may even indicate less than that. Sixty-five percent of e-journal users do not ever return to that journal. If they download that journal, they may never go back to it.
“Squirreling away”: I am that way with food. When I travel, I have one bag with food. Do I eat that food? Not usually, but I have it. The other day I pulled out a granola bar and I happened to look at the date, I think it was 2008. Luckily I had others! That is how individuals view information: they squirrel it away; they may need it someday.
STUDENTS
Behaviors
This quote came from one of the twelve studies: “The speed of young people's web searching means that little time is spent in evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority.”Footnote 6 And that is what we are finding: they really are going through very quickly, and they are not looking at the authenticity of the information.
Big news: they prefer keyword searches. At NetLibrary, I was always pushing that we needed advanced search technologies, and the developers said, “Give me proof.” So I started doing log analysis. Guess what? No, they used very simple terms, usually “education,” “history”—very broad terms. The research indicates that the more expert a searcher is, the broader terms they will use; the more novices they are within the subject, the more specific terms they will use. You are looking at me like, “Does she have this wrong?” And that is what I thought, too. But no. Why? Because those who are experts do not trust the indexers, so they are going to go very broad so that they do not miss anything. They are very confident in their skills, and that is something we have learned: they think they know it all, they can find it. A “screenager”Footnote 7 (between twelve and eighteen years old) once said to us, “I would trust Google over a librarian.”
“Satisficing” comes up a lot. Not just with students, but also with faculty and scholars and the graduate students. “You know, this is good enough. I got it. If they told me I needed ten references, I have ten, and three are books, I don't care, I'm done.” Speed comes in, but convenience is number one. When we look at the virtual reference services transcripts, we will see many of them saying, “I need this answer in five minutes. I have to get to class.” So then, speed is very important.
Information Literacy Skills
Students are confident with the information discovery tools. What we are finding in this new study that seems to be a little different than the earlier studies is, of course, Google. The others are Wikipedia and Facebook, and they have been very prominent within our research. Also, when they look for credibility, they use their common sense.
Usually websites that have like one colour backgrounds, where it's a lot of just like basic text, there's not a lot of graphics. They don't really look nice, they look, kind of, like somebody just threw a website together and put it up online. It's like I don't trust those because it's like, you know, they didn't put a whole lot of time into this, I wonder how credible they are, so I don't trust them usually. (U.S. university student, male, age 19)
It is kind of like a guess and check to see which one works best or which one gives you the most information. It is not necessarily to see which one is more credible because if you want credibility you are not necessarily going to look online for it. (U.S. university student, male, age 19)
I often just click on the first page, I'm not sure why. Don't really go further. But yes, it's hard to know what to trust though. (U.K. high school student, male, age 18)
They also are looking for credible recommendations. They look for the reputation of the company or the organization; they do a lot of cross-checking.
You know, let's say it's not even in an academic context. I have to see the same conclusion reached by lots of different people in different contexts. Like I need to see the same answer again and again and again. And maybe at some point that's enough time where it starts to get to me that this probably is a good approximation of the truth. It might not be the truth but this seems to be what a lot of people perceive as the truth. So that would be the simplest way to do it. (U.K. high school student, male, age 18)
That's the only problem: just knowing what information to use and why. (U.K. high school student, male, age 18)
Yet they do not want us to teach them.
Frustrations
Their frustrations:
| • | They want it on their desktop, they want it on their mobile phone, and they want it now. They are busy, they have other things to do, and they are always connected, so they want it at this time. When we look at virtual reference service transcripts, we will see that there is a dialogue between the reference librarian and the user. The reference librarian will often say, “Let me check with your academic library or your public library.” The user will say, “Oh, no, don't worry, I'm in the library.” Why? It's more convenient to talk to someone via this virtual world. Some of them say, “Well, I don't want to get up and leave my things, my laptop is there, I just feel more comfortable not leaving.” Others say that they do not have this relationship with the librarian, and so they really do not want to talk face-to-face. | ||||
| • | Our websites are hard to navigate. Imagine that! | ||||
| • | The library is inconvenient. | ||||
| • | The perception studies that were done at OCLC in 2005 and 2010 say the same thing: libraries equal books.Footnote 8 They do not realize that we offer many of these online sources. They will say, “I'll go into JSTOR and I'll find an article and that article is online and it's really quick and easy.” And I will say, “Can I get to that article if I just go into the library?” “Well, I don't think so. I think that the university pays for that for us through our student fees.” The library never comes up. We do such a good job not marketing what we do. | ||||
Some quotes on this:
She [professor] was very direct about certain stuff and wanted me to go to the library. Of course like the library's like a second home for me, so that's fine. But the research I needed wasn't showing up. So I was like okay, I'm going to the internet. And I had to find quotes from books, so I just like was able to go on Google, Google book search, and find the quote I needed. And I didn't write down it was from the internet. … So she doesn't really know (Laughter) that it's from the internet. (U.S. university student, first year, female, age 19)
I have better things to do than go drive all the way to the library when I can just sit at home and type it into my computer. (U.S. university student, first year, female, age 19)
Yes, I'm sure, because, you know, going to the library was a task. And part of, I'm sure, a lot of people, and as far as me is concerned from laziness, it was much easier to just scrap around. It's so much easier to just strain to find something on the internet than to, like, drive to the library. But that was in high school. In college, and especially grad school, I'm not afraid to go to the library anymore because we have a very good [library] and we have a very good website. (U.S. graduate student, male, age 25)
We are learning that there are transition periods as they move into that third and fourth year of undergraduate studies. And then as they get into graduate school, they start to change. But the younger people are a bit different.
I don't use the library. Most students really don't anymore, I know a couple of people that live here [he was being interviewed in the library] but they don't actually use it for books, they use it as a quiet place to study. (U.S. university student, first year, male, age 19)
When my sister was in college, I went to visit her and I said, “Let's go to the library.” She looked at me and said, “For what?” And I said, “I want to see it. Don't you go to the library?” She said, “Only to get dates.”
Tools Used
The tools that students use: Google, Wikipedia. They also use library websites and e-journals, although they may not know that they are provided by the library. Human resources are very important: they are always connected on Facebook, and we have learned that they are exchanging ideas there. If the person they are looking for is not on Facebook, they know someone else will be. So there's always someone connected. The graduate students go to their professors, their advisors, their mentors, and they talk about electronic databases.
One of my favourite ways of getting information is by asking people. Instead of Googling the whole time I mostly have faith in the fact that people are actually learning, if I can go to a tutor and ask them something. (U.K. university student, first year, female, age 19)
Like usually with homework I usually can do it myself. But like, like sometimes I will just like IM my friend on Facebook and will be like, “Hey do you know how to do this?” That is usually how I will do it or I will text somebody but for the most part if I can't figure it out then I just kind of star that question because there is usually just one or two questions. Or I will just go to my parents or my Grandma or something. (U.S. high school student, female, age 17)
I use my friends a lot. I use people that I know know things about like if they're, maybe not specialized but know what they are. Ask them first and then they'll give me information. Because for me as I said I'm a people person. I trust what my friends say. I know what to take from them. Maybe they may not be the same as me and may not believe the same stuff. I know what I can take from them at least. (U.S. high school student, male, age 18)
Information Seeking in Action
With the people we are tracking, first we do interviews with them for an hour to an hour and a half, and then we follow a sub-group for three years. They give us diaries every month, in any format they decide: they can e-mail, text, Skype, or send videos. This is a student from the United States in his first year of university, and he has chosen to send videos:
I was in the library and I was looking for a book to read, and I'm really interested in astronomy, and I was just studying one day with my friend for a stats test and we happened to be on the seventh floor near the windows and I saw there was a whole, like, row of books, like a whole aisle on both sides, for like astronomy and cosmology, and that was real surprising. I didn't know that we had those kinds of books outside of just textbooks. There was a wide selection of books that were there. I'm really mainly more into cosmology than astronomy, and that was real cool, they had a lot of those kinds of books there too. It was kind of weird though, because I went to the express, like, express scanning checkout thing and it didn't work, like, I scanned my—I swiped my card and I scanned the book and it said I couldn't check the book out. So I didn't get it that day. But I came back like four days later and tried the thing again and it didn't work. And then I went to the actual lady at the checkout desk and she checked it out for me, that's fine. So that was kind of—I thought that I wouldn't be able to actually get the book because the swiping, like, self-checkout thing didn't work. And that was weird. And this was also weird in that I didn't go to the lady, the actual checkout line, to check back first, or afterwards, but either way, I got the book.
You will notice he talks about “the lady at the checkout desk.” There was another U.S. first-year university student, and he kept talking about the “lady in the library.” Something an interviewer should never do—and I know better, but I did it—I said, “Oh, the librarian.” And he looked at me and said, “No, it's the lady in the library.” I just read another study saying that many faculty and students think that librarians are more like customer service representatives, answering questions like “Where's the bathroom?” and “Where are the computers?” They do not understand that we actually can help them within specific subject areas and to find information. With the virtual reference services, we learned that many of the younger people, especially—that “screenager” group—were afraid to ask the librarian anything. When we asked why, they said, “They always look busy and we don't want to bother them.” Now when I go into a library I try to pay attention to what is happening at the desk when I first walk in. Sometimes you will see people behind the computer, or looking at something else, or have something in front of their faces, and I wonder if that is why they get that vibe—we are busy. But they do not know that they can just come up and ask a question. Sometimes they are intimidated; they are afraid.
RESEARCHERS
Behaviors
The researchers are quite different. We have to be very careful: I am making these generalizations based on twelve studies and our research over the past nine years. That is not everyone; you are always going to find anomalies. Some people will say, “We all know this; this is nothing new.” Now we have a lot of data to support this. The question is what do we do next? As we know, researchers differ with the discipline. The researchers in the sciences are the most satisfied with the sources that they have. The arts and humanities researchers have very serious problems; they feel that they can't get information that they need.
Faculty, in general, do not understand copyright. Looking at the virtual research environments, and also with the digital repositories, we learned that many would say, “Well, I don't remember what I signed for this paper; I just signed it.” Or, “I can't find the documentation. I don't know what we can do with this.” That is something else where I think we can come in and assist.
They also are self-taught in their discovery services. Sixty-two percent of them in one study reported that they had no formal training and most of them are confident in their skills. A study in the United Kingdom learned that the doctoral students pick up the same patterns as their professors.Footnote 9 So, they learn from their professors.
We did a study in New Zealand with computer science faculty 15 years ago.Footnote 10 We went back last year and asked the same individuals the same questions, and then asked them what had changed. What they said was, “I don't know how to find any information.” (And this is what we learned 15 years prior.) “But now I depend on the students to tell me.”
Frustrations
Their frustrations:
| • | Accessing the online journals, especially the back files came up a lot: “Why can't I get these back files in digital format?” | ||||
| • | They all want everything on their desktop. | ||||
| • | Humanities scholars, especially, have a difficult time finding non-English content. | ||||
| • | Unavailable content: They go to WorldCat or the catalog and they read that there is something available but they cannot access it. To them, that dead link—that dead end—is very frustrating. | ||||
| • | Irrelevant information in the results list: “Why did this come up? I don't know why this is there.” | ||||
| • | The humanities scholars said that they feel there is a dearth of specialist search engines for them. They feel that everything is geared to the sciences. | ||||
Tools Used
The researchers use Google, Web of Science, PubMed, and Science Direct. JSTOR comes up a lot. They have said that 99.5% of them use journals as their primary resource. Journals ranked 71% of the time as one of the top three resources, so journals are very important to the researchers. Ninety percent mentioned the expertise of individuals as an important resource. So, they will go to a colleague. I learned that probably the colleague is not in the same university as they are; they will be working with others who know their field and their specialization.
BARRIERS TO THE LIBRARY
Faculty said they get very frustrated when they go into the library. They will say, “There aren't enough signs, and when there are I don't understand them.” One of them said, “You know, I'm a smart person but when I go to the library it makes me feel stupid.” There is that intimidation factor. They think it is very complex. Also, they feel that we do not integrate the resources; we segregate them. They do not care; they just want to know what we have within that subject area.
A study came out last year about library language, and they said that is one of the biggest barriers to library usage. This is an example: I have been seeing the dentist a lot lately, and I saw him this week on Monday, and he said, “So where are you going this week?” And I said “Oh, I'm going to Nashville.” “What are you doing there?” “Oh, I'm going to speak to a group called the North American Serials Interest Group.” He looked at me and he said, “Is that like serial killers?” And I said, “No, no!” And so I had to explain. Then my husband said, “Where are you going this week and what are you doing?” And when I told him, he said, “Is that like Post cereals, and Chex cereals?” And I said no, and I started to explain, and I thought: Something that easy is very difficult for others to understand. So imagine some of our other lingo that could really throw them. We are great for acronyms as well.
JOURNALS
JSTOR keeps coming up a lot, and the researchers are not much different than the students. They visit for only a few minutes, they want shorter sessions, they do basic searches, they view a few pages, and they often find the content through Google. And that comes up a lot: they are not using other means.
The Ethnography Research in Illinois Academic Libraries (ERIAL) study, a two-year study with individuals, determined that JSTOR was the second most frequently mentioned database out of all of the databases studied.Footnote 11 In our study in 2005 we interviewed an undergraduate student—now, talk about a teachable moment—this young man said, “I couldn't find anything on this subject, and so the librarian told me about JSTOR.” He said, “It was great, I found everything I needed, so now anytime I need anything, I go to JSTOR.” So, he learned: it worked once, so it is that adage of if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You are going to go in, and it is going to work again.
One of the big problems now is access. They want the full-text access, and one thing that is very difficult for them is all these authentications and logins, and that turns people off. They do not like that at all. They want seamless discovery: just get right in, like they do when they get into some of the online sources. Libraries are not looked at as providing these electronic databases.
INFORMATION LITERACY VERSUS DIGITAL LITERACY
We think that the younger people know how to navigate in the Web and find information and are so technologically savvy. We are finding in our research that that is not true. The reason we came up with “digital visitors and residents” was that we were looking at Prensky and the digital immigrants and natives concept and saying, “This isn't right.”Footnote 12 There are many other variables that determine how technologically savvy one may be. We do not think age is the major determinant, and that is what we are learning in this three-year longitudinal study. But what we are finding is that they are very good at the texting, the Facebook, the Wikipedia. We have coined the term “learning black market” in our new study, and that is when learners use non-traditional sources but feel that they cannot talk about them or reveal them in an institutional context. They talk about using Wikipedia all of the time, but when I ask them, “How do you reference that?” they are not dumb, they say, “We go to those references at the end of the article and we cite those.” And when I say, “Do you look at them?” they say “No.” They are working around us. The ERIAL study also came up with this, and said the students do not even know how to search Google well.
I used a lot of journals, like scientific journals and stuff and then I even didn't use a computer for some of it. Like I went to the library and found stuff there. And like we learned how to use google a little better, like fish out the .com and stuff, like you can do that. And just get the .orgs and .edu's because they are more reliable sources. (U.S. high school student, female, age 17)
So, something that easy: they do not know how to limit to just maybe the news, or Google Books. These are things that we can help them with.
WHAT WE CAN IMPROVE
Big surprise, our Online Public Access Catalogs (OPACs) should be improving. There are some quotes from the Karen Calhoun study that said, “Make it [the library catalog] as easy as a Google Book Search.”Footnote 13 One suggested, “I wish the results pages would list a short blurb, one line about the book, similar to the way Google shows you a tiny bit about what a site link is about.”Footnote 14 So they want a little more information from us.
We have been doing a lot of focus group interviews on WorldCat.org. What we hear is they want more reviews. The researchers want reviews from experts, not just anyone. The students want reviews from their colleagues, their peers.
I always tell people not to use library and information science graduate students as subjects because they are an anomaly. However, Bertot and others just published a study this year, and the information studies students at the iSchool at the University of Maryland reported that 28% use the OPAC daily or weekly, and 86% use Google daily or weekly.Footnote 15 These are people who will become us, and they are not using our catalogs all that much either.
LINKING TO THE LIBRARY
We really need to start linking; that is very important. I always brag about what University of Nevada, Reno did with one of their special collections.Footnote 16 They created Facebook pages, with individual people from their special collections who were students in 1913. And they created these individuals, and had dialogue between them, and got thousands of friends, and this is the way they got individuals interested in their special collections. I talked to the director last week and she said they had to take down those individual pages, but they do still have the pages about that special collection. You cannot just say “I have a Facebook presence” and expect the students to use it. We have a Facebook presence for our longitudinal study. No one uses it; they do not want to talk to us there. The only person who sent us a video was one young man—he sends us videos every month, I think he loves doing it—but everyone else e-mailed us. When we asked why, they said because it was for “academic purposes.” The “screenagers” were much blunter and three years earlier said, “E-mail is for old people, so that's how we'll communicate with you.” You can't just have a Facebook page and expect them to be there, you have got to get them going.
MAKING THE LIBRARY MORE ATTRACTIVE
We need to make our systems look more like search engines. An undergraduate student said, “I figured it out. I go to Amazon, find out everything I need, and then I copy and paste the author and title and put it into my library catalog and use my library catalog for location.” I started talking to her a little more, and she said, “My friends pay me now to do their research. And I'm graduating and I'm going to library school.” (I told her she would probably take a cut in salary.) But here we are, we have attracted someone to our profession, who is working around us, and maybe she will come in, and people like her will come in, and change things for us. But I also think we need to provide the search help at the time of need. Why are we not out there? If somebody gets into our catalog and is fumbling around, why do we not have a chat box at the bottom saying, “What are you looking for?” Other places do it. The airlines, who I think are the worst people for customer service, even have a chat box where you can talk to someone right now.
Convenience: people are into instant gratification. We need to be there to deliver the answers, and do it conveniently. We need to start moving toward a more user-centered development approach. We have always been collection-centered, and guess what? Our collections are very different today.
Trove is at the National Library of Australia.Footnote 17 When we were doing focus group interviews there, users loved Trove. They just think that that is the best thing, and it is their online catalog for the national library. But it looks very much like Google. Another example is the Westerville Public Library, and what they are doing to make it look more like what our users are accustomed to.Footnote 18
An interviewer said, about looking at reviews, “You kind of trust the crowd at a certain level.” And the subject said:
At a certain level, yes. I'm also wary but I also trust the crowd, especially for like tying a tie video. There are 10 million views for this tying a tie video, it probably is pretty good. (U.S. graduate student, male, age 25)
STARTUP SOLUTIONS
I do not know if any of you looked at the Brian Mathews article, “Think Like a Startup.”Footnote 19 Library assessment has always been about satisfaction and performance. When I was in the doctoral program, one of my research professors said, “Lynn, if you ask people if they like something, they're always going to say yes, especially if it's a service that they think is free. Because if they say no, they're afraid that you're going to take it away from them.” And so I am wondering if we are not asking the right questions. Mathews is saying we should be looking at library assessment to look at what we need to be doing. We need to be more proactive instead of reactive.
Right now we are focusing on sustainability. We need to start looking at new services. Things have changed drastically, and that is one of the reasons we are looking at these question and answer sites. More individuals use social question and answer tools than virtual reference services. When we look at the transcripts, many of the answers that people vote on as correct are actually incorrect. So we need to have a place in some of these other arenas.
We evaluate how we are doing right now, and we should really be looking at where we are headed and evaluate that. We teach information literacy but we really need to rethink this; we need to be a part of the whole workflow, the whole learning process. We really need to expand on the whole idea of the embedded librarian. We have always been information-focused; we have got to look at the users—everything should be centered on them.
We are very into traditions, and that needs to change. We always have been providing resources, access, space to study; that may not be important later, either. Right now we are saying, “Oh it's good physical space. You can get dates there; you can get coffee, whatever.” No, it is prime real estate and we really need to be considering what else we can do.
Mathews is saying we should be really looking at 21st-century learners. He uses the Starbucks experience as an example, which is good because we need to be focusing on relationships. When you order a coffee from Starbucks, pay attention: they always repeat what you said. Do we do that in a reference interview? Not all the time. And I found that in the transcripts with virtual reference: we are answering questions and spending five minutes and then someone says, “That wasn't my question.” Nordstrom's is another one: they repeat to you what they think you said. It is really building relationships instead of building service excellence.
I think we need to not be afraid to fail, and we need to be able to say, “This is good enough, let's try it, it's good enough.” Our users do it all the time. They satisfice, and they survive. We can, too. You need to try a lot of things. You are talking to the woman who left a very secure university job and went to a startup. But that was probably the best thing I did in my life, because we were excited and we tried new things that I never would have done. And that is the way we need to be looking at our libraries today. We may lose something, but I think in the end we will gain. It is all about these relationships.
KEY ISSUES FOR LIBRARIANS
And so I think we need to keep talking, and by that I mean keep talking to our users. We need to pay attention to them, and listen. We can talk, but we also have to listen. We need to just keep moving, look around us, and see what is going on in the world. We need to change and we need to market what we do. We do some things very, very well, and nobody knows it. And that is our big problem: we are not good at tooting our own horns. We need to start removing some of these barriers between finding information, discovery and then delivery because that is very frustrating to our users. And keep it simple. We need to think about our lingo. We need to think about the way we display things on our websites and even the flow in our libraries, in our physical buildings. Because again, these are things that people do not understand. We need to move on.
Notes
1. “Visitors and Residents: What Motivates Engagement with the Digital Information Environment?” http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/vandr/ (accessed July 12, 2012). Quotations in the presentation attributed to U.S. or U.K. students are taken from this study.
2. Lorcan Dempsey, “Always On: Libraries in a World of Permanent Connectivity,” First Monday 14, no. 1 (January 5, 2009), http://www.firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2291/2070 (accessed July 12, 2012).
3. Lynn Silipigni Connaway and Timothy J. Dickey, The Digital Information Seeker: Report of the Findings from Selected OCLC, RIN, and JISC User Behaviour Projects (JISC, 2010), http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/reports/2010/digitalinformationseekerreport.pdf (accessed July 12, 2012).
4. Lynn Silipigni Connaway and Timothy J. Dickey, Towards a Profile of the Researcher of Today: What Can We Learn from JISC Projects? (JISC, 2010), http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/418/2/VirtualScholar_themesFromProjects_revised.pdf (accessed July 12, 2012).
5. Lynn Silipigni Connaway, “Mountains, Valleys, and Pathways: Serials Users' Needs and Steps to Meet Them. Part I, Identifying Serials Users' Needs: Preliminary Analysis of Focus Group and Semi-Structured Interviews at Colleges and Universities,” The Serials Librarian 52, nos. 1–2 (2007), 223–236, doi:10.1300/J123v52n01_18.
6. Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future: A CIBER Briefing Paper (UCL, 2008), 12, www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/reppres/gg_final_keynote_11012008.pdf (accessed July 12, 2012).
7. “Screenager” is defined as “the child born into a culture mediated by the television and computer,” in Douglas Rushkoff, Playing the Future: How Kids' Culture Can Teach Us to Thrive in an Age of Chaos (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 3.
8. Cathy De Rosa et al., Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources: A Report to the OCLC Membership (Dublin, OH: OCLC, 2005), http://www.oclc.org/us/en/reports/2005perceptions.htm (accessed July 12, 2012); and Cathy De Rosa et al., Perceptions of Libraries, 2010: Context and Community: A Report to the OCLC Membership (Dublin, OH: OCLC, 2011), http://www.oclc.org/us/en/reports/2010perceptions.htm (accessed July 12, 2012).
9. Researchers of Tomorrow: The Research Behaviour of Generation Y Doctoral Students (JISC, 2012), http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2012/researchers-of-tomorrow.aspx (accessed July 17, 2012).
10. Sally Jo Cunningham and Lynn Silipigni Connaway, “Information Searching Preferences and Practices of Computer Science Researchers,” in Sixth Australian Conference on Computer-Human Interaction: Proceedings, November 24–27, 1996, ed. John Grundy and Mark Apperley (Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1996), 294–299, doi:10.1.1.82.193.
11. Steve Kolowich, “Study: College Students Rarely use Librarians' Expertise,” USA Today, August 22, 2011, http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2011-08-22/Study-College-students-rarely-use-librarians-expertise/50094086/1 (accessed July 12, 2012).
12. Marc Prensky, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” On the Horizon 9, no. 5 (October 2001), http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf (accessed July 17, 2012).
13. Karen Calhoun et al., Online Catalogs: What Users and Librarians Want (Dublin, OH: OCLC, 2009), 14, http://www.oclc.org/us/en/reports/onlinecatalogs/default.htm (accessed July 12, 2012).
14. Ibid., 17.
15. John Carlo Bertot et al., “Assessing the Usability of WorldCat Local: Findings and Considerations,” The Library Quarterly 82, no. 2 (Apr. 2012), 207–221, doi:10.1086/664588.
16. Nick DeSantis, “On Facebook, Librarian Brings 2 Students from the Early 1900s to Life,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 6, 2012, http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/on-facebook-librarian-brings-two-students-from-the-early-1900s-to-life/34845 (accessed July 12, 2012).
17. Trove (National Library of Australia), http://trove.nla.gov.au/ (accessed July 12, 2012).
18. Westerville Public Library, http://www.westervillelibrary.org/ (accessed July 12, 2012).
19. Brian Mathews, Think Like a Startup: A White Paper to Inspire Library Entrepreneurialism (April 2012), http://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/handle/10919/18649 (accessed July 12, 2012).