Branding the academic library

By Ned Potter, Academic Liaison Librarian

Earlier in the year I got to head over to Denmark, to deliver a keynote at the Danish Academic and Research Library group's annual conference. The subject of the conference was marketing, and I was specifically asked to talk about the academic library brand.

Here are my slides:

 

Branding the Academic Library from Ned Potter

There were a couple of key points I wanted to get across - one is that the brand is everything your users experience! Colours and logos are branding, and they are part of a wider attempt to positively influence the brand - but we can't control the brand. The voice we use in our communications, the experiences people have at the front desk, the collections and services we offer: all of this makes the brand.

We also can't influence the brand on a national or global level - at least not without a great deal of difficulty. It's a lot more realistic for each specific University library to try and build a better brand; rather than to try and change the overall perception of the academic library as a concept.

I also stressed, as I always do, that the key to marketing libraries well is to do so in campaigns. Any questions or comments, let me know below! 

Running library induction like a marketing campaign

By Ned Potter, Academic Liaison Librarian 

Running Academic Library induction as a marketing campaign from Ned Potter

We won an award! York just received a Bronze Marketing Award from CILIP's Publicity and Public Relations Group at the annual PPRG Conference, held in Birmingham in January.

It was in relation to the work we'd done on our Induction project - in 2016 (and then this year as well) we got rid of the big orientation games, and ran it like a marketing campaign. It worked really well and we got a great response - some elements weren't successful and we improved on them this year.

The slides from my talk are above, or alternatively you can view a video below. This is the audio from my talk, with a version of the slides designed for the video instead of for face-to-face presenting - there's videos-with-the-video, and other things to make it a bit more interesting to watch...

It was a great conference. The other award winners had all done really good campaign marketing too, and this supports an idea I bang on about all the time, which is that it's campaign marketing that really works. The same message, tailored across multiple platforms, for a concerted period of time: that's what is required for marketing to be effective.

Thanks to the (soon to be renamed!) PPRG group for the award and the excellent event. 

UX-led changes at York and beyond

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By Ned Potter, Academic Liaison Librarian 

As anyone who has embarked upon User Experience work will have learned, ethnography is actually the easy part. For all its messy, complicated, time-consuming complexity, getting the go-ahead for fieldwork and undertaking it is relatively straightforward compared to designing (and getting approval to put into place) changes to our services. It is vital to have a cut off point where we as UX practitioners stop collecting data, bite the bullet, and move on to phase 2 of the process. After all, it's the design and service tweaks that make this UX - otherwise all we're really doing is ethnography.

I think it's really important to a) push as many small tweaks through as possible, and then learn from them and assess their impact, and b) make details of the changes publicly available so others can get not just inspiration but a use-case to push through their own change.

Last month I talked to an audience from the libraries, museums and archives sectors at the LAM Marketing Awards put on by the Welsh Government. The image above is from the presentation, which was on UX, how it relates to marketing, and potential application for ethnographic techniques outside the library sector. If you're interested I wrote more about the day on my own blog here, and I'll embed the presentation below, but in this post I want to focus on UX-led changes, which was one section of my talk. What have institutions been doing as a result of what they've learned from ethnography? I have several examples from the University of York and some from further afield too.

I thought it might be useful to group the examples of UX-led improvements into categories. In all these instances ethnographic fieldwork has either instigated the change or supported the change - it's interesting that often UX can be the trigger to get something done which library staff and users have been considering and / or suggesting for a while. Often the fieldwork is one source of feedback alongside a couple of others in the examples below, which combined to be a strong enough argument to make a change.

Catalogue improvements

At York we've made several small changes to Yorsearch, the (Primo-based) library catalogue, in addition to the full user-interface change which will arrive shortly. 

Classmarks visible in results screen 

• The classmark for books now appear in the search results screen, rather than the user needing to click on a title to reveal its location. It's only a small change but we get around 25,000 views a day for Yorsearch - that's a lot of people now having to make one less click to get what they need. This particular change came from our first UX project with Postgrads, along with work from the Discoverability Group, and from seeing that that Imperial had successfully achieved the same thing with their Primo interface already, following their own UX work...
• Talking of Imperial, they've made the full report of their 2016 UX work available for anyone to download [*applauds*] - have a read, it's fascinating and useful material.
• We changed the terminology in the catalogue on the buttons you press to access books and ebooks - from Get It and View It, to Find in Library and View Online. Again this came out of several sources of feedback, including the Discoverability Group, and front-desk staff reporting that users simply didn't seem to get it when it came to View It and Get It.

Library space and environment improvements

• We made a hot-water tap available 24/7. Our UX work revealed that particularly in winter  students from Asia like to drink hot water in the way that in the West a lot us like to drink chilled water; this gave more context to previous requests for a hot drinking water tap. One has now been installed alongside the chilled water fountain.
• We made the Burton Library accessible 24hrs a day. Our library is open 24 hours, but previously only the main Morrell Building (the one with the books) and the Fairhurst (lots of study space) stayed open all the time; the silent reading room in the Burton closed at 10pm. Our UX work constantly demonstrated that the Burton was not as highly valued as we imagined it was - for example several students left it out of their congnitive map of the building, almost no students included it in their touchstone tours, and in our behavioural mapping we even observed students wandering up to the entrance, peering in to the stairwell that led up to the reading room, then just turning around and coming back, apparently not feeling like they wanted to cross the threshold. As part of the UX unstructured interviews we discovered that even some students who knew about the Burton didn't like using it because even if they had no intention of working past 10pm, they loathed the idea of setting up all their work and devices etc and then having to move them to another building at 10pm if they were still there at that time after all.
  
  So we upped our promotion of the Burton, it had a very nice re-design (although that wasn't directly related to anything we'd done with UX, it was happening anyway) and we made it accessible 24 hours a day. We're now monitoring the space as part of a new UX Project and the initial impressions are that it's already busier.
• We've given the students blankets. A pile of blankets in a basket near the entrance - people can help themselves and deposit the blankets back there when they leave. I cannot tell you how popular this has been... There are examples of effusive tweets and feedback on our graffiti wall in the presentation below - it's so nice to do something simple but effective! Temperature is always a problem in libraries, and there's often a more or less even split between people who are too hot and too cold. My History of Art students came to me to say they found working in King's Manor (our City-centre site which is nearly 500 years old so not overly warm) really hard when it was so cold. So we managed to get Estates to get some more heaters, and we bought blankets - this idea came from some UX work undertaken at Cambridge in 2015. We also bought blankets for our main library and the Minster library too.
  
  (Top tip: buy really drab and unexciting looking blankets. They keep people just as warm but are much less likely to go missing...)
• Thanks to Ingela Wahlgren and Andy Priestner who gave me examples of their (current or former) institutions having changed the locations of digital screens as a result of behavioural mapping, in order to put the screens somewhere people will actually look at them. This could be displaying key info in areas where people have to queue, or it could be as simple as putting them in the direct line of site as students move forward through a space, rather than off to the side in people's peripheral vision.
• Sometimes students describe an area as noisy even though it's ostensibly a silent study zone. Truly observing the space can often solve the mystery of why this is happening - Jenny Foster gave me an example of her institution realising the beep of the self-issue machine could be heard four floors up! So they found the volume and turned it down. At Cambridge they discovered there were loud hinges on office doors so they oiled them...
• Like with the noise examples above, small changes really do add up. Carl Barrow told me some of the changes his HEI had made based on their fieldwork: additional signage (both analogue and digital), more printers, phone charge stations (why aren't we all doing these?) and a new coffee cart. Together all those minor tweaks will have a significant impact on the user experience, which is the name of the game after all.
• UPDATE: At the #NCLXUX event I've just heard Carl say they also re-positioned digital screens, having noticed no one looked at most of them. One, which was positioned in the entrance as people came through the turnstiles, DID get looked at - so they used that exclusively to promote the Skills Team's workshops, and as a result saw a much bigger uptake for those sessions... I love this - a great example of the impact UX can have in unexpected ways...

Library service improvements 

• At York we've moved academic staff onto our part-time package for borrowing books, giving them a little longer to return items without impacting too heavily on the rate of circulation overall
• We've changed the way we run our annual review of subscriptions to allow for more time and stop it clashing with other key things in the academic calendar
• We've changed the way we communicate key information to academics
• We've used academics' detailed views on our current reading list system to inform the choosing and customisation of the new one
• At Cambridge the FutureLib developed a whole app for finding study space

UX and Impact

I'm excited to hear a load more examples of UX-led change at UXLibs III (the third annual User Experience in Libraries Conference). The paper submissions we've had this year are fantastic, and the emphasis of the conference this year is on the impact of UX.

Finally, here are the slides from my talk which mention a lot of the examples above, along with some next steps if you want to try ethnography at your own institution, and introductions to ethnography and design:

UX, ethnography and possibilities: for Libraries, Museums and Archives from Ned Potter

If you've got more examples of UX-led changes at your organisation, leave them in a comment (or leave a link to where we can read about them) to make this post more useful! Thanks.

Library Action Plans Part 1: An Introduction

By Ned Potter, Academic Liaison Librarian 

The next post on Lib-Innovation will be by Michelle Blake and will go into detail on our Annual Action Plan process. This has proved an incredibly valuable way of engaging with, and getting engagement from, all the academic departments at York.

Ahead of Michelle's post, the presentation below gives a brief introduction to the process, its evolution over the last few years, and shows some examples from a 2015 Action Plan.

Lights, Camera, Action Plans! from Ned Potter

Creating library images with copy-space for text

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By Ned Potter, Academic Liaison Librarian 

As always things have changed in the library over the summer, and we needed some new images to reflect our reconfigured rooms, new signage and new services. We're very fortunate to have easy access to the University photographer Paul Sheilds, who is based in our Morrell Library building, so we booked a morning with him.

We had very specific needs in mind, based on a list we'd drawn up to suit what I wanted for our Induction Project, what my Academic Liaison colleague David Brown wanted for the new LibGuides (more on which in another blog post) and what the Comms Team needed. In particular I was really keen to get photos with copy-space.

Copy-space literally means a space to write 'copy' in the newspaper meaning of the word - in other words an area of the image which is less busy and which could be written upon without obscuring a key part of the picture.

In essence I wanted to be able to write directly onto the images (for use in slides, posters, digital screens and social media) without having either a separate area for text, or a back-filled text box - because I think it looks smarter that way and because it allows the images to be full screen at all times. It's a lot easier to do this when the images are captured with that in mind from the outset.

Here are some examples - these are works-in-progress that I'm playing around with for the forthcoming #UoYTips Induction campaign for 2016/17. They probably won't look exactly like this in the final versions but the copy-text principle will remain.

We have borrowable laptops which I wanted to showcase. I've added a piece of text to the copy-space:

Here's an example of an image of the same lockers which is a great pic but which doesn't have copy-space built in:

It would be possible to write on this of course, but you'd need to manipulate the image to ensure the text was legible, or used a back-filled text box.

Next up is a picture of the copy-print-scan machines - the copy-space in this case being the underside of the lid. I did experiment with having the text at an angle to match it but it looked a little clunky so I went with good old fashioned horizontal text for this one...

Here's a picture of a student - by not putting her centre of the frame (and by conforming to the rule of thirds) we've made space for the text.

Finally here's an example where despite leaving copy-space the background is too busy to write directly onto - the text wouldn't be clear enough. There's a neat divide where the wall ends, so I've inserted a shape over everything to the left of the wall, to make the copy-space more clearly defined. I did this in PowerPoint - inserting the rectangle, filling it black, then making the fill 19% transparent. The white text is clearly visible against it, and the focus of the image (the walls you can write on) is still clear and uncluttered.