ABSTRACT
It is not often that you attend a meeting in which different people with different agendas reach complete consensus on a way forward, but on a cold January day in Cambridge University Library’s Milstein Room this is precisely what happened. The topic on the table was the relative merit of the concepts presented to us by design consultancy Modern Human, which we planned to test out in libraries across Cambridge as part of the ongoing FutureLib programme funded by the University Library (see https://futurelib.wordpress.com" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://futurelib.wordpress.com). The programme, which I have been managing since July 2015, is seeking to pilot new and innovative library services and products which respond to the real needs, wants and behaviours of our users, and have been derived from an ethnographic research phase. The ethno-graphic techniques employed during this 18-month-long phase were:
‘guerrilla’ walk-up interviews with students;
in-depth but unstructured interviews;
shadowing academics as they went about their daily lives;
diary studies with undergraduates so we could better understand their activities, preferences and study routines.
The research data gathered led the design consultancy to propose 12 concepts in all which could be piloted as services or products by teams of library staff who had recently been mobilised. It was precisely because each of the 12 concepts responded to a need or gap pointed up by the research that we initially struggled a little in the aforementioned meeting to reach a consensus on which concepts to take forward to test. How can you choose between concepts that have all been derived from a ‘deep dive’ research phase that has offered more reliable data on user need and behaviour than any previous project? Ultimately it came down to four interrelated factors: cost, maximum benefit, timescale and the ease of investigation. ‘WhoHas?’ (detailed in the subsequent chapter by Helen Murphy), which sought to explore the possibility of legitimising the student practice of sub-lending books to each other, won because it was a concept that we recognised would be easy to test, could be implemented quickly, and at relatively low cost. Also it responded to, and would explore, a behaviour that we were keen to learn more about. The second concept we chose, and were in unanimous agreement over, was ‘Spacefinder’: a 95new web-based service that would match user study preferences with available study spaces across the University. It would be more expensive than WhoHas? and take longer to implement, but we could all see its huge potential value to all students and libraries.