Participatory Design in Academic Libraries: New Reports and Findings. CLIR Publication No. 161

This report is based on a series of presentations at the second CLIR Seminar on "Participatory Design of Academic Libraries," held at the University of Rochester's River Campus June 5-7, 2013. Participatory design is a relatively recent approach to understanding library user behavior. It is based on techniques used in anthropological and ethnographic observation.This second volume hears from a number of librarians and library staff who have taken CLIR workshops and gone on to conduct their own participatory design projects. In these papers, they explain how they learned about the people who use their libraries, whether in person or online, and how they applied their findings to the design or improvement of library technologies, spaces, and services. The papers in this volume are presented in ten themed chapters: Introduction: Chapter 1. Participatory Design in Academic Libraries: The Second CLIR Seminar (Nancy Fried Foster); Keynote: Chapter 2. Organizing the Library for User-Centered Design (David Lindahl); Methodological Papers: Chapter 3. A Recipe for Participatory Design of Course Pages (Susan K. Cardinal); Chapter 4. Improving Norlin Commons: An iPad + Evernote Approach (Mark Werner and Mark Mabbett); Chapter 5. Co-Viewing: Creating Broader Participation through Ethnographic Library Research (Marilyn Pukkila and Ellen Freeman); Observational Studies: Chapter 6. Portrait of One Floor: What Students Are Doing in a Library Space (Susanna M. Cowan, Joelle E. Thomas, Steve Batt, Kate Fuller, Kathy Banas-Marti, Kathy Banas-Marti, Kathy Labadorf, and Jane Recchio); Chapter 7. Qualitative and Quantitative Studies at Butler Library: Exploring Student Use of Library Spaces (Nisa Bakkalbasi, Francie Mrkich, and Barbara Rockenbach); Large-Scale Projects: Chapter 8. Replicating Rochester: Developing a Feasible Multi-Institution Study of User Information Needs in the Health Sciences (Jeanne Link and Jonna Peterson); Chapter 9. Participatory Design of the Active Learning Center: A Combined Classroom and Library Building (Jeremy R. Garritano and Jane Yatcilla); Institutionalizing Participatory Design: Chapter 10. Library Practice as Participatory Design (Geoffrey Swindells and Marianne Ryan); and the Appendix: Results of the Roundtable Discussions. [Individual chapters include references. The first volume "Participatory Design in Academic Libraries: Methods, Findings, and Implementations," was published in October 2012. It is available at http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub155.]