This week, a series of short interviews was conducted with users of the Science Library, resulting in a better understanding of why students are in the library, how often and what their most common activities are. The needs expressed by students can serve as handles for the Visual Navigation Project. Furthermore, based on the initial exploratory phase of the project, we engaged in creating a detailed proposal for the “streams” of activities to be conducted in the project.
Specific activities
- Creating a detailed project proposal for the activities in the Visual Navigation Project Three streams, representing different perspectives of the project
- Stream 1. “Continuation”: Extended Emnesøk. Refine and extend the existing Emnesøk application, increasing its practical value for both end-users and library personnel in the Science and Medical Library.
- Stream 2. “Visual Navigation”: Visuelle Emner. Use the Emnesøk infrastructure as foundation for providing visual navigation tools for library collections.
- Stream 3. “Physical Interaction”: Experiments towards new ways of interaction in a physical library space. Explore new interaction paradigms in the physical library space, using results stream 1. and 2., as well as projects by informatics students
- Interviews with library users Realfagsbibliotek
- (Hugo and Yaron). 10 short interviews conducted on Wednesday 19.10.2016. Short interviews with 5 key questions plus follow-up questions. Between 11:00 and ~14:00
4 interviews (1-4) in Science Fiction area (BC)
3 interviews (5-7) near balcony/rail on 2nd floor (LK)
3 interviews (8-10) in Hangaren (“reading room”) (HG)
Aim: finding out why students are in the library and how often, their activities in the library and their knowledge about library services
Some initial observations
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Most of the interviewees are very regular library visitors. 4-6 times per week (8 students)
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The most common expressed activities are studying and working on assignments
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According to various participants, the library induces a “working mood” (even though a few students go to the science fiction part of the library for relaxing)
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Three gradations of “silence” preferences: total silence, semi-silence (occasional noise, e.g. students talking from time to time) and preferring a more noisy study environment. The various physical spaces of the Science Library actually embody these gradations, even though not all students knew about the “silent” working places yet. There were some issues in navigating the library for first time visitors (starting students)
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Book lending is not very common among the group, which may also be caused by the large number of first year students in the sample (“not yet needed”).
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One participant explicitly indicated occasional exploration and browsing of books, though others may have an interest as well
A few lessons from the interviews
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Majority of participants were very frequent library visitors
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Visual navigation solutions should be dynamic and trigger people to use them again
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We should try to engage some of the people to start exploring (students in early stages of their study), and other to explore more (different, varied) books
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Digital services (visualizations) in a physical environment should be dynamic, engaging, inviting