Ask of yourself what you’d ask of a vendor
February 11, 2008
A month ago Cliff Landis wrote a post directed at vendors (My 2.0 Advice to Vendors), giving them advice about what to ask and do when designing new products or enhancing existing ones. As I move forward with my own library’s website redesign, I was reminded of this post and realized that almost every single point he had made would also apply to a library doing its own work on a tool or site. The crux of his position is that we need to ask users what they want, pay attention to what they say and do, and focus on them a thousand times over. If you are looking at improving any of the tools you library offers, take a look at Cliff’s thoughts and you might find that they stimulate some of your own.
February 15th, 2008 at 8:21 am
Glad to see you continuing to raise the issue of actually involving users in the process of making decisions. While recently reading yet another article on how to improve library OPACs, I was struck by the writer’s blind spot: he talked insistently about including all key players and then went on to list nothing but various staff interest groups, with nary a mention of non-staff users of the catalog. Hope each mention you give to this issue helps sensitive all of us to the importance of making decisions in an us-and-us setting rather than the us-and-them mode which is all too common in libraries and other nonprofit organizations these days. And wouldn’t it be wonderful if non-staff catalog users (that group that Joan Frye Williams so effectively refers to as “civilians”) were actually invited to be part of the decision-making process by having a couple of seats on what have traditionally been staff-only committees? I await the sound of thick walls falling.