The Whys

1
The Whys Hows of Students Faculty
Finding What They Want Insights from
interviews Iowa OCLC Users Group Conference May
27, 2005 Lynn Silipigni Connaway, OCLC Chandra
Prabha, OCLC Brenda Dervin, OSU IMLS Grant
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The Whys Hows of Students Faculty Finding
What They Want

• Project funded by
• Institute of Museum and Library Services
• 480,543 grant to Ohio State University
• Ohio State University (OSU)
• 209,340 in kind contribution
• Online Computer Library Center (OCLC)
• 319,412 in kind contribution

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The Whys Hows of Students Faculty Finding
What They Want

• Project Phases
• Project duration
• Calendar years, 2004 and 2005
• Four phases
• Literature reviews and dialogue
• Sense-making surveys online phone
• Focus group interviews
• Structured observations

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The Whys Hows of Students Faculty Finding
What They Want

• Study Populations
• 44 colleges and universities
• 100 mile radius from Columbus
• 400 informants
• 100 each
• Faculty
• Graduate students
• Undergraduate students
• netLibrary users
• Samples, stratified by Carnegie Institutional
  Class Codes

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Input from users
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The Whys Hows of Students Faculty Finding
What They Want

• Focus Group Interviews
• Think of a time when you had a situation where
  you needed answers or solutions and you did a
  quick search and made do with it.  You knew there
  were other sources but you decided not to use
  them. Please include sources such as friends,
  family, professors, colleagues, etc.

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The Whys Hows of Students Faculty Finding
What They Want

• Focus Group Interviews
• Have there been times when you did not use a
  library (university/college, public, etc.) and
  used other sources instead? 

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The Whys Hows of Students Faculty Finding
What They Want

• Focus Group Interviews
• Think of an academic situation where you needed
  answers or solutions and you did a thorough
  search (you did not take the first answer that
  you found). Describe the situation.

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The Whys Hows of Students Faculty Finding
What They Want

• Focus Group Interviews
• If you had a magic wand, what would your ideal
  information systems and services provide? How
  would you go about using the information systems
  and services? When? Where? How?

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Input from librarians
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The Whys Hows of Students Faculty Finding
What They Want

• Project Dialogues and Librarian Surveys
• Local Advisory Committee
• National Advisory Committee
• OCLC Members Council
• OCLC Board of Trustees

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The Whys Hows of Students Faculty Finding
What They Want

• Project Dialogues
• Library director or representative from each of
  the 44 academic institutions
• Library director or representative from
  geographically contingent public libraries
• 79 were invited
• 31 participated

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The Whys Hows of Students Faculty Finding
What They Want

• Online Survey
• OCLC Members Council and Board of Trustees
• 126 online surveys distributed
• 34 responses 27 response rate

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Common Threads in Librarian Responses
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The Whys Hows of Students Faculty Finding
What They Want

• Information needed for development of
  user-centered services and collections
• Who are the users?
• Where are they getting their information?
• Why dont users think of the library first?

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The Whys Hows of Students Faculty Finding
What They Want

• Biggest challenges of the advance of electronic
  information systems
• Too much information, too many choices
• Not knowing users expectations and needs
• Off-site users

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The Whys Hows of Students Faculty Finding
What They Want

• Biggest challenges (continued)
• Non-standard search interfaces
• User training
• Designing systems for users not librarians
• Competing with Google, Amazon, Ask Jeeves

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The Whys Hows of Students Faculty Finding
What They Want

• Differences between how practitioners and
  researchers look at users
• Researchers ask why questions
• Practitioners are interested in how questions
• Researchers see users in abstract
• Practitioners see users in real-time
• Pursue collaborative research
• Make practitioners an integral part of research

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The Whys Hows of Students Faculty Finding
What They Want

• Differences (continued)
• Overwhelming affirmative response
• Theory vs. practice
• Ivory tower vs. real world
• Researchers general approach vs. practitioners
  individualized approach
• Researchers unreality paint

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The Whys Hows of Students Faculty Finding
What They Want

• Continue to analyze data
• Write and submit for publication
• Literature Reviews
• Reports of findings

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END NOTES

• This presentation is one of the outcomes
  from the project Sense-Making the Information
  Confluence The Whys and Hows of College and
  University User Satisficing of Information
  Needs." Funded by the Institute of Museum and
  Library Services, Ohio State University, and
  OCLC, Online Computer Library Center, the project
  is being implemented by Brenda Dervin (Professor
  of Communication and Joan N. Huber Fellow of
  Social Behavioral Science, Ohio State
  University) as Principal Investigator and Lynn
  Silipigni Connaway (OCLC Consulting Research
  Scientist III) and Chandra Prabha (OCLC Senior
  Research Scientist), as Co-Investigators. More
  information can be obtained at
  http//imlsosuoclcproject.jcomm.ohio-state.edu/