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This is my third set of posts as part of the Library Day in the Life project, although it’s the sixth round of the project as a whole, which aims to record typical (and atypical) days of library workers around the world. You can find all of my posts within this project under the librarydayinthelife tag. For those new to this blog, I am an academic librarian, providing scientific subject support at a UK university.

Today started with more work on the user testing of the current library website, but started as yesterday ended with the new web developer, briefing him on the user testing. This was followed by a chat with the rest of the academic liaison team so that he got to know them a bit better (he has only really worked directly with the web team so far).

It was good to look at the user testing with a pair of fresh eyes, and we had an interesting talk about which information resources sit in which system – my next task is to draw a diagram illustrating the overlaps and differences in content between the catalogue, link resolver, databases etc. The user testing indicated that this was a source of some confusion to library users, and that they could easily become uncertain where to go if they couldn’t find resources where they expected. This was followed (of course!) by more report writing.

After lunchtime, I had a bit of a break from the user testing material as Joanna Newman, Head of Higher Education at the British Library visited to talk to library and academic staff about the British Library’s 2020 Vision. Joanna talked about the need for shared digital strategy: she suggested that all academic libraries working individually on developing our systems might better be served by collaborative development facilitated by the British Library, which would certainly have changed the nature of our current web project! Good food for thought.

After this came my last dash to answer all my outstanding queries for the day, and to get the report finished, as I wasn’t going to be back in work for six days. I ordered a few books, answered a query about coverage of a particular ejournal title (it was available up until May 2009, but no more recently) and agreed to investigate books in a particular subject area for an academic next week.

Finally, I just managed to get the report finished and sent off by 17.30. I’m aware that major decisions need to be made about the new website in the next couple of weeks, and was determined that the results of the user testing would be available to feed into this, but it was a rather intensive couple of days getting it finished!

Leicester's New Walk in cheerier weather

This is my third set of posts as part of the Library Day in the Life project, although it’s the sixth round of the project as a whole, which aims to record typical (and atypical) days of library workers around the world. You can find all of my posts within this project under the librarydayinthelifetag. For those new to this blog, I am an academic librarian, providing scientific subject support at a UK university.

My two main intentions for Tuesday and Wednesday (my two full days at work) were to finish the report on the user testing sessions we ran on the existing library website before Christmas. We’re moving the whole website to  the university’ new content management system Plone this year, launching a resource discovery system and reworking all our subject pages, so we wanted to have a good look at the old pages and some common (but not necessarily simple) tasks that library users carry out.

Most of the day was therefore spent trying to tame the data a little bit: I’d made a fair start at the analysis, looking at the route that the test pairs had taken through the library webpages for each task. Tasks included finding out how to get a reminder of their library PIN, and trying to access a journal article (which I knew we didn’t subscribe to). Finally some major themes seemed to be coming out of the data for each question, and I was able to move on from the basic analysis to start thinking about implications a bit.

We also had an update of the library web team, at which we discussed progress so far, the sessions IT’s Information Architect has been running with library users, mobile apps, and lots of other stuff.

My main contribution to the meeting was reporting back on a session I’d run with the Information Librarian team discussing our requirements for the new subject resource pages. I followed up the meeting with an unscheduled chat with the new web developer based in the library who had some great ideas for ways of making the large amount of information that needs to go on these pages manageable and easy-to-use, so it was well worth discussing.