The Library in the Life of the User

ASIS&T Regional Meeting Dublin, OH
March 3, 2017
The Library in the Life of the User
Lynn Silipigni Connaway, PhD
Senior Research Scientist

Our traditional model was
one in which we thought
of the user in the life of
the library
… but we are now
increasingly thinking
about the library
in the life of the user
(Connaway 2015)
(Dempsey 2015)

The workflow context
Convenience & context switching
Fragmentation is a deterrent
(Dempsey 2015)
Need to provide services for what people
actually do, not what they say they do

“Nearly 60 percent of the world’s
people are still offline.”
(Pattillo 2016, 164)

“Young people’s ability to reason about the
information on the Internet can be summed up
in one word: bleak.”
(Stanford History Education Group 2016, 4)

“…Americans indicate
that they could make it a
week or less without
Internet access (67%)…”
(Birth 2015)

“Freshman and
sophomore students
using the university
library as a place to
study are more likely
to have positive
outcomes as
measured by retention,
graduation, and grade
point average.”

“A four-year longitudinal study
of a freshman cohort at a large
public university found that, as
students matured, they used
library resources more
frequently for their research.”

“The national graduation rate for public high school
students rose to a new high…However, graduation rate
gaps persist among the racial and ethnic subgroups.”
(Patillo 2016, 616)

“The location of the library link on doctorate-granting
institution websites correlates with research output.”
(Simpson 2016)

E-reader device sales have been declining and traditional
print publishing have remained stable.
(Alter 2015)

“Print books continue to be more popular than e-books or audio
books.”
(Perrin 2016, 2)
“…sales of printed books have grown for the first time in four years,
lifted by the adult colouring book craze and 150th anniversary of
Alice in Wonderland.”
(Sweney 2016)

“A University of
Washington pilot study
of digital textbooks
found that a quarter of
students still bought
print versions of e-
textbooks that they were
given for free.”
(Rosenwald 2015)

“On average, faculty
preference for using
scholarly monographs for
reading in depth remains
high for print format rather
than digital format.”

“…around half of
newspaper readers
consume newspapers
only in their printed
form. They are more
likely to often watch
local TV news than
those newspaper
readers who access
the paper online
instead of or in
addition to the print
edition.”
(Barthel 2016)

“I love…to read the
newspaper. I love the
hard copy, the
physical one.”
(Digital Visitors and Residents, UOCFI3,
Male, Age 48, Information Science and
Communication Studies)

Satisficing…What is enough information?
“…I needed the answer, my
maths, I was doing an
exercise, I got stuck on a
question, I still had the rest of
the exercise to go and I had
like an hour to do it and I just
wanted the formula and the
quickest way to do it was to
type it into Google and it came
up.”
(Digital Visitors and Residents, UKS2,
Female, Age 17, Secondary School Student)

“[When you search
information] you
notice that new
information arrives
every moment ...Until
you are tired and
then you stop
searching.”
(Digital Visitors and Residents, UOCG4,
Male, Age 41, Health Sciences)

“Google now handles at
least 2 trillion searches per
year.”
(Sullivan 2016)

Centrality of Google & search engines
“…I just think it’s [VLE web site] too
complicated and it’s limited, that I just
carried on going on Google.”
(Digital Visitors and Residents, UKS6, Emerging, Female, Age 16, Secondary
School Student)

“People lack patience to wade
through content silos…”
(Connaway 2015, 134)
“Yes, it [Matrix film plug-in to brain] - sort of
makes information gathering effortless and
without having to sort of manually go through and
separate the chaff from the wheat.”
(Digital Visitors and Residents, UKU10, Male, Age 20, Law)

“It’s like a taboo I
guess with all
teachers, they just
all say – you know,
when they explain
the paper they
always say, ‘Don’t
use Wikipedia.’”
(Digital Visitors and Residents, USU7,
Female, Age 19, Political Science)
The Learning Black Market

“At first I started looking
online, and it was a little
bit overwhelming…I
ended up reaching into
my mom’s cupboard and
using a recipe that I found
in one of her old
cookbooks. The recipe
was just what I was
looking for...”
(Digital Visitors and Residents, USS3,
Emerging, Female, Age 17, High School
Student)
Motivation & behaviors change
based on context & situation

“...my father knows a lot...I
trust him.... If he tells me to
look at this page, or he
shows me one of his books,
even if they are old-
fashioned.”
(Digital Visitors and Residents, UOCU2, Female,
Age 28, Information Sciences)

Multi-tasking
“So, I’ll be like looking over at
that and then like either
Facebook or my email will beep
at me and I’ll click on that, see
who sent me something and
then go back to working. So, it’s
always, kind of, open and there.”
(Digital Visitors and Residents, USU4, Male, Age 19,
Engineering)

“You spend many hours,
with Saint Google. We
entrust ourselves to Saint
Google, and that solves it
for us.”
(Digital Visitors and Residents, UOCFI6, Male,
Age 53, Arts & Humanities)

The personal context
Relationship – sharing – engagement
(Dempsey 2015)

“…youth ages
14-24 make up
25% of all
public library
users.”
(Braun, Hartman, Hughes-
Hassell, and Kumasi 2014, 1)

“In the public library there are two
or three people. I know the staff…
Once I participated in a civil
servant open examination and
they helped me a lot.”
(Digital Visitors and Residents, UOCU1, Female, Age 22, Information
Science and Communication Studies)
Build relationships

“When I need a quick
answer my preferred
source is a person,
because a person would
interpret your need
quickly and better than
Internet.”
(Digital Visitors and Residents, UOCU5, Female,
Age 30, Education)

“If my other friends recommended it to me and used chat reference
services themselves I might be convinced to try them...”
(Seeking Synchronicity, NOS-94938, Female, Age 15-18)

Promote resources available to users
“Sometimes libraries are closed and i need help so
this [VRS] would be a great alternative. This method
should me advertised more.”
(Seeking Synchronicity, NOS-36503, Female, Age 15-18)

Librarians and services within the workflow
“I haven’t called them, I don’t think I’ve ever talked to
the librarians here since I’m not in the building
much.”
(Digital Visitors and Residents, USU4, Emerging, Male, Age 19, Engineering)

Screenagers have a traditional
view of librarians
“It’s like, it’s like, you don’t
want to go “So which shelf
are you pointing at?”
Because, I mean, once they
do their famous point, it’s just
like…”
(Seeking Synchronicity, Focus Group 6
participant, Female, High School Student)

The personal context
Relationship – sharing – engagement
The environmental context
Spaces and places
(Dempsey 2015)

Space for socializing & work groups
“We do go to the library or somewhere quiet where we can
just get our work done together...”
(Digital Visitors and Residents, UKU3, Female, Age 19, French and Italian)

It’s time for a change
“Librarians have
an opportunity to
become part of
users’ social
networks and to
put resources in
the context of
users’ information
needs.”
(Connaway 2015, 23)

Embedded librarianship
…be where our users need us
“Our experience with a proactive chat model…
showed us that there is indeed a ready-made
market for our services right on our own library
pages...”
(Zhang and Mayer 2014, 205)

“Library is a growing organism.”
(Ranganathan 1931)
Use what you know
Learn what you don’t know
Engage in new ways

Thank You!
Lynn Silipigni Connaway, PhD
Senior Research Scientist
connawal@oclc.org
@LynnConnaway

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