Libraries: Institutions or assemblages?

By Katherine Howard

Gerolami, N. (2015) The library assemblage: creative institutions in an information society.  Journal of Documentation, 71(1), pp. 165-174. doi 10.1108/JD-09-2013-0120


“Institution or assembl…. What?!”
Assemblage. Or, more specifically, the concept of assemblage as a theoretical foundation in which to view the library as a tool for social justice.

In this conceptual paper, Natasha Gerolami introduces us to Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory, which she uses to “develop a theory of the institution that highlights the library’s potential to resist forces of domination” (p. 165).  While that may seem a little melodramatic for this day and age, Gerolami points to moments in time where libraries have attempted to constrain individuals – the notion of class at the end of the nineteenth century, for example.  She quotes William Kite (1877) in stating that “working class men and women would remain “content with their lowly but honest occupations”” (Kite, p. 278 as cited in Gerolami, p. 170), so long as the library was stocked with literature that was appropriate for their class.  If working class individuals started thinking about new possibilities for themselves, they may very well “disrupt the status quo” (Gerolami, p. 170).

Before looking at the application of assemblage theory, Gerolami first looks at the concept of an institution, and how, through a social contract theory lens, they are seen as suppressive or oppressive.  Libraries as institutions are not exempt from this, as history (and quite likely recent events) has shown us.  Social contract theory portrays society in a negative light; the aim of the ‘contract’ is to suppress the base instincts of society. Libraries perpetuated this view through the provision of “good literature” – that somehow immoral behaviour and society’s ills would be corrected if society were only exposed to the good stuff.  

Gerolami then turns to Deleuze’s theory of institutions as an alternative to social contract theory.  Deleuze is all-encompassing in his conceptual understanding of ‘institution’:  social institutions such as marriage, and government institutions such as schools, hospitals and prisons are included.  In contrast to social contract theory that sees society negatively, Deleuze sees the potential to “conceive of institutions in a positive and inventive manner …” (Gerolami, p. 167).  In theory of institutions terms, the library as an institution “is best understood as a productive space […and …] a creative rather than repressive force [with the potential] to produce new social networks” (p. 168).

Finally, the use of assemblage theory is as a way to ground library services as tools for advocacy discussed.  In short, assemblage theory states that “different components of the assemblage [i.e. the library] are not determined or defined by the whole assemblage of which they are a part.  Parts can […] be detached and removed […] and connected to another one [i.e. another assemblage].  Furthermore, the assemblage is more than merely the sum of its parts” (p. 168).  What this means in practice is that the library (as an institution) “could be assembled with other institutions, forces or people (p. 169).

While the article is perhaps not the easiest to read, Gerolami peppers it with analogies, which helps to make it more realistic rather than merely conceptual.  She questions the continued use of potentially out-dated concepts (e.g. evaluation methods used in collection development), and uses the theoretical concepts discussed to encourage the use of “old concepts in new ways” (p. 170), 

This is pre-print version of the article published in Incite, Jan/Feb 2017

Image: Don Urban, Orrery Steam Punk

Dr Katherine Howard, AALIA 
Lecturer, Information Management, School of Business IT & Logistics | RMIT, Melbourne
katherine.howard@rmit.edu.au 

LARK in 2017

By Suzana Sukovic

Now that New Year resolutions and plans are on the fast track to reality, it is time to tell everyone what LARK has on its collective mind for this, still fresh and promising year. On 30 November last year, a group of LARK’s faithful and some new people celebrated another successful year and made plans for this one, but we waited for your full attention to tell you what we have in store for LARK. 

This year LARK will become 5 years old. In the life of a small, predominantly online group, without a stable institutional home and a big following, this is quite an achievement. On the other hand, research has never been and probably never will be a mass endeavour. In our meeting at the end of last year, we decided we are happy to keep it that way. After all, LARK has thrived this long thanks to the efforts of a small group of committed people. With an online presence and global community, small is a relative thing. Last month’s LARK blog had 7561 views. That is in the month when only one post was published and everyone was frantically busy with end of year work and celebrations. LARK’s face-to-face gatherings easily fit around a café or large dining table, but many people across the globe take part in our online activities.

Connections are certainly spreading in Australia. Our exciting news is that this year we will start a LARK chapter in South Australia. Liz Walkley Hall, who has led a research group at the Flinders University Library, will organise LARK face-to-face events in Adelaide and participate in shaping LARK’s online events. We plan to keep the collective spirit by organising simultaneous face-to-face events in Sydney and Adelaide.

LARK will keep the tradition of offering four events a year. A mix of online and face-to-face events worked well last year so we will do the same in 2017.
• Week 20 February: Our first meeting will be online. In this meeting we will connect with health professionals to discuss shared interests and learn from each other. Our guests are experienced researchers in rural and remote NSW. It will be an excellent opportunity for professionals from all over Australia, particularly, rural and remote areas, to connect.
• Beginning of May: We will kick-start the South Australian LARK chapter by organising simultaneous face-to-face meetings in Adelaide and Sydney.
• Week 20 September: Our fifth anniversary will be celebrated with the most ambitious event of the year. Watch this space!
• Late November or early December: as always, time to celebrate and network.
• #EBLIPRG (Evidence Based Library and Information Practice Reading Group) on Twitter is officially a separate initiative. In reality, with Liz and me involved with both LARK and #EBLIPG, the separation line is pretty blurry. This year #EBLIPRG will meet every second month on the last Thursday of a month. 
26 January: The first #EBLIPRG meeting this year.

I hope you are thinking that you would like to get involved. It would be a great way to kick-start your research project or connect with like-minded people. If you aren’t working in libraries and are thinking whether it is the right group for you, I can assure you that the “library” in “LARK” is just for the sake of a good acronym. People who come to our gatherings are from the broad library and information field. Over the years, we had quite a few teachers who easily found common topics with library and information professionals and academics.

How to connect?
• Come to our online and face-to-face events. Everyone is welcome.
• Volunteer to present or help out with the organisation of events. LARK events are attended by friendly people. 
• Write a blog post and send it to lark.kollektive(at)gmail.com. I read this email a few times a week and will get back to you quickly. Any suggestions can be sent to this email too.
• Send research and EBP news to the mailing list (see left hand side of this page for details).
• Like us on Facebook.
• Tell your colleagues about LARK and our events. Even better, join us together.


Hope to get in touch online or in face-to-face meetings!

Dr Suzana Sukovic, librarian with a meandering career, is now Executive Director, Educational Research and Evidence Based Practice at HETI (Health Education and Training Institute). She is ready for some inspiring interprofessional learning this year.

Twitter @suzanasukovic

Part 4: Academic city of villages

By Suzana Sukovic

At a time when information spurts from everywhere, numerous voices demand to be heard and traditional authorities are under scrutiny, academia occupies challenging and contested space. Particularly indicative of wider changes in the information and knowledge field are humanistic disciplines. They epitomize academic traditions in which historical resources and dialogues with the past are an essential part of academic work. Scholarship in the humanities can also act as a touchstone for and a commentary on the present.

I would like to propose that the way in which humanists negotiate the fast changing information world is based on the model I call the ‘academic city of villages’. Academics, especially in the developed countries, live in an information metropolis in which information is available in abundance and wide variety. However, academics’ everyday life is defined by norms and traditions of their disciplines which dictate the rules of their academic worlds. ‘City of villages’, a metaphor promoted by town planners of cities such as San Diego, Los Angeles, Dublin and Sydney, is used to present some of the dynamics of living in disciplinary ‘small worlds’ or ‘villages’ within an information metropolis. This proposition is based on my study of roles of electronic texts in the humanities and, later, research into transliteracy.

Small information worlds and a ‘life in the round’

Women who eat dirt for its perceived benefits, prisoners, janitors and retired women are people who live in impoverished information worlds, yet employ complex information practices. This insight arose from the work of Elfreda Chatman who developed an information theory of a ‘small world’ and a ‘life in the round’, showing how groups influence and determine information behaviour. Chatman (2000, p. 3) described the concept of a small world as ‘a world in which everyday happenings occur with some degree of predictability’. ‘A small world is also defined by natural philosophy and everyday knowledge’ (Chatman, 1999, 210). A ‘life in the round’ is a public form of life, ‘a “taken-for-granted,” “business-as-usual” style of being’ (Chatman, 1999, p. 207). Chatman showed that powerful social rules determine conditions and ways in which information is sought, what acceptable information is and what appropriate uses of information are. Individuals usually conform or keep socially unacceptable practices private.

Saying that the information behaviour of academics follow some similar patterns to those of information impoverished groups sounds far-fetched. However, findings emerging from my study of research practices of academics in the humanities show similarities, which are not obvious at face value.

Social types are central to the normative behaviour of a social group. ‘Legitimised others’ in Chatman’s theory are comparable with academic ‘big guns’ who need to be convinced that a piece of research can and should enter academic circle. A historian who studies contemporary religions, such as Jediism, Heathenism and beliefs in extraterrestrial life, many with a strong online presence, described ‘big guns’ in the following way:

… the big guns have grown up in a different kind of scholarship and they’re the ones who edit the journals and who run the big publishing houses. [It is] important that you convince them that you really can do real scholarship… It’s a kind of professional accreditation problem that people who work in really kind of out there fields are stuck with. (Participant 5/2)

Academic peers are ‘insiders’, people who are in command of norms and who judge what is trivial or useless: ‘They are the quintessential frame of reference for observing and controlling not only behavior, but also the information flow into a social world’ (Chatman, 1999, p. 212). When academics in my study talked about ‘students’, ‘young generation’, ‘traditional historians’, ‘big guns’ and ‘people who work in out-there fields’, they described academic social types that play a part in shaping information processes.

Secrecy and self-protective behaviours are part of living in a small world. Self-protective behaviour is apparent in situations when the need for information is recognised as potentially helpful, but is ignored, often because of the desire to ‘appear normal’ (Chatman, 2000, p. 7).  Scholars choose to make their information behaviours, such as the use of online sources, public or keep them private in relation to the norms, worldviews and possible reactions of their peers who have roles of ‘insiders’ and ‘legitimised others’. The dismissive attitude of peers to the use of electronic resources is evident in scholars’ public discourse, summarised in ‘all that crap from the net’ as a conversation topic as described by one of the study participants. This discourse observed in some academic circles is quite likely to make an individual researcher reluctant to ask questions that would reveal the extent of her or his own use, which may be seen as unscholarly or unauthoritative. The majority of study participants talked about an area where information about the use of electronic resources and digital methods was needed, but that information had not been sought. The lack of discussion about uncertainties related to the use of electronic resources and the unexpressed need for training are signs of an impoverished life-world. It does not relate to an absolute amount of information that has been shared, but rather to an undisclosed information need.

Living in a city of villages

Academic disciplines define the norms and practices accepted by a disciplinary community and set boundaries of academic small worlds. However, disciplines do not function as isolated environments. It is increasingly common that scholars work in interdisciplinary fields, and belong to different disciplinary communities, negotiating their different cultures, traditions and expectations. Even if they remain within the boundaries of a single discipline, they live in a dynamic information environment populated by international scholars. This vibrant environment can be seen as an information metropolis. At the same time, academics follow the rules of their immediate disciplinary communities, which form their small worlds.

How do scholars negotiate potentially contradictory demands? They usually have a primary discipline, but they seek information in other disciplines if that is the requirement of their projects. Boundary-crossing usually happens according to the rules of the primary discipline. In some cases, it means following traditional trails of academic authority. For example, a literary scholar in the study worked in a well-defined discipline where she has been a recognised expert. A sense of authority is based on knowing sources very well. However, to satisfy the requirements of a particular project, she had to leave the established information paths and seek information in neighbouring fields. The process happened according to the dominant academic tradition by following the advice of a colleague in the other field. In other words, the researcher does not normally leave her village in search of information, but when she has to do that, it happens according to the rules of following well-established academic expertise.

For other scholars, negotiation of different disciplinary rules and project demands require trade-offs. When a historian decided to write a book aiming to open a challenging dialogue with traditional scholars, he excluded references to all sources that he felt would not be acceptable to these colleagues. However, he introduced a style of writing promoted by interactions with electronic sources, which ‘pushed the edges’ of traditional scholarship.

Academics who visit blogs, tourist web sites and forums about extraterrestrials leave an academic neighbourhood to roam around the city and listen to stories in dark alleys and under bridges. Stories from the underbelly of the city are often socially unacceptable in established disciplinary clubs in university quarters. Scholars who frequent the clubs, but cross the boundaries of academia, often learn from the ‘dark stories’ and consider how to present them according to accepted disciplinary conventions. In non-traditional fields within traditional disciplines, it means more or less successful ‘dressing up’ of research, which Participant 5/2 described as a way of using disciplinary theories and citations to make unconventional research acceptable to the mainstream discipline. In more traditional literary and historical studies, it means taking unaccepted sources into account without referring to them openly.

Scholars who do cross boundaries against the rules of their discipline, would do so because information is perceived as critical or there is a perception that a ‘life in the round’ is no longer functioning. Rapid changes in academia, inconsistent systems of promotions and evaluation of scholarly work, as well as conflicting expectations, indicate that academic life is functioning with a number of difficulties. Participant 15/1 talked about experimenting ‘without an umpire’ in mind in the environment in which some peers are interested in experimental work with the multiplicity of resources while others do not think that it meets scholarly standards. According to this participant, scholars who work in new fields start within a traditional discipline and gradually split away when another community takes shape.

In a metropolis, news travel fast and it is impossible to maintain local customs untouched, but that does not negate the existence and influence of small villages. The balance between the preservation of a village life and the interaction with the metropolis — sometimes threatening, sometimes alluring – is in flux even in the most sheltered villages.


It may be that other professional worlds work in a similar way, but more research is needed to establish the evidence. However, an understanding of social processes in academia helps us to enhance our understanding of knowledge processes and wider societal changes. It helps us also to provide information and professional development services tailored with deeper understanding of our clients’ information worlds.

References

CHATMAN, E. A. 1999. A theory of life in the round. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50, 207-217.

CHATMAN, E. A. 2000. Framing social life in theory and research. The New Review of Information Behaviour Research, 1, 3-17.

Previous parts in this series are available from LARK blog:

Part 3: Transliteracy palettes: developing capabilities for “moving across”

Part 2: What is transliteracy?

Part 1: Transliteracy: the art and craft of moving across

They are also availabe from SciTech Connect.

This article was first published by SciTech Connect where the following information was provided:
"Transliteracy in Complex Information Environments was published in November. If you would like to pre-order a copy, please visit the Elsevier Store.  Apply discount code STC215 at checkout for 30% off the list price and free global shipping."
The book is available in print and electronic format.

Part 3: Transliteracy palettes: developing capabilities for “moving across”

By Suzana Sukovic

A definition and conceptual model of transliteracy was proposed in the previous post in this series titled What exactly is transliteracy? (also LARK post What is transliteracy?). In short, transliteracy was described as a fluidity of movement across a range of technologies, media and contexts. The conceptual model of transliteracy was presented as an overarching concept encompassing information and ICT capabilities, communication and collaboration, and creativity and critical thinking. All these capabilities are already recognised as crucial for successful living in contemporary society. The key question concerns their co-ordinated development to enable skill and knowledge transfer in an unknown future.

A model of transliteracy palettes (above) is proposed as a tool to aid the development of transliteracy in teaching and learning. Transliteracy palettes describe what people have at their disposal to shape their transliterate practice and understanding. Two main parts of the transliteracy palettes consist of an information palette and a form palette. In order to develop the ability to move across a range of contexts, media and technologies, it is essential to practice “mixing and matching” palettes in novel combinations.

Information palette

Information and ICT capabilities have been identified as a critical part of transliteracy. These capabilities are also integrated in the well-established information literacy framework. The understanding of the information process presented in the information palette draws upon Foster’s comparison of the information process with an artist’s palette on which activities remain available during information-seeking (Foster, 2004). 

The titles of the components on the information palette capture essential information qualities and practices, especially in relation to transliteracy.
• DEFINE question, information needed and main sources relates to the conscious understanding, which takes a person in a particular direction in the information process. It is based on identifying an information need. 
• FIND AND ACCESS sources and relevant information captures the search process in which relevant information may be found in a range of sources. Finding the sources and relevant information is a part of the process, but so is an ability to access them. Access has been clearly identified here as it relates to the findings of my transliteracy study pointing to the significance of access conditions and understanding of social contexts surrounding information access.
• EVALUATE-SELECT refers to evaluation as a well-recognised aspect of the process, but it also brings to the fore selection. Valuable information may or may not be selected for a number of reasons, which may be related to considerations other than the quality of information. Selection decisions need to be a distinct part of a holistic understanding of the process and conscious information strategy. 
• MANAGE is about organising information based on content, technical and any other relevant characteristics. The word 'manage' has been chosen instead of 'organise' as it better captures potential complexity of working with information.
• CREATE-PRESENT-ACT is about various forms of information use to create new information, understanding and knowledge; combine existing information for presentation purposes; and the use of information to inform decisions and action.
• REFLECT is part of the process in which individuals and groups reflect on the process, ethics, norms and personal meanings. Reflection comes at the beginning of the process as people think and realise an information need, throughout the process as they decide about the next step, and at the end of the process to evaluate and understand recent experience. In educational contexts, it is important to embed reflection as a formal part of the process.
• HOLISTIC UNDERSTANDING of the process ¬is indicated by the idea of the palette rather than individual colours. It emphasises the importance of understanding the information process and its components as a whole.

Form palette 

This palette captures ‘forms’ that shape interactions with information. 
• EXPERIENCE is about opportunities to act, sense and think through a range of different experiences such as writing a story, performing, reading and working visually.
• MEDIA relates to the use of different media formats (for example, book, video, database).
• COMMUNICATION is about using different forms of communication through different channels in a variety of genres, languages and for different audiences.
• COLLABORATION is about working with others formally and informally face-to-face, online and in blended environments. 
• CITIZENSHIP refers to understanding of a range of social issues, which determine successful participation in information environments. It includes legal, normative, cultural and ethical issues. Copyright, plagiarism and appropriate online behaviour as they are commonly taught in educational settings are part of this 'form'.

The transliteracy palette consists of both information and form palettes, and an ability to mix them in many different combinations. Learning to apply different colours to many different forms in a range of different situations is a way to develop transliteracy. 

REFERENCE
FOSTER, A. 2004. A nonlinear model of information-seeking behavior. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55, 228-237.



These explanations of the transliteracy palette are taken from the chapter Transliteracy in practice in the book Transliteracy in complex information environments. The chapter is available for free download, providing further discussions about implementation transliteracy in the practice of teaching and learning.

Previous posts are available from Elsevier SciTech Connect and LARK blog:
Part 1. Transliteracy: the art and craft of moving across 
Part 2. What is transliteracy? 

This article was first published by SciTech Connect

Enough with the Shhhhh!

#EBLIPRG November
Enough with the Shhhhh! - Journal Discussion on Twitter
By Fiona Macdonald

Our EBLIP reading group is continuing to meet every second month on Twitter to discuss articles which support an evidence-based approach to Library issues.

In November the reading is:
McCaffrey, C. & Breen, M. (2016). Quiet in the Library: An Evidence-Based Approach to Improving the Student Experience. portal: Libraries and the Academy 16(4), 775-791. 

Student feedback to academic libraries consistently and increasingly indicate conflicting desires: more quiet space, more collaborative space, makerspace, silent study, more interactive or social space. There are increasing expectations of all of the above, and libraries usually have to manage on the same footprint. So what do Libraries do in terms of noise management? And what works?

Join us on Twitter #EBLIPRG and discuss:
• Actual noise v’s perceived noise
• Do signs work?
• Impact of furniture and design
• Zoning
• From intractable to manageable – what works

WHEN? Thursday 24th November 4 pm AEST (Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne) on Twitter #EBLIPRG 
Facilitated by Fionamac @macdonaldf

Image above: 
https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3243/2903662286_e906fc5c2e.jpg

Eat, drink & plan

By Suzana Sukovic

​This is the last event of the year. We'll celebrate the end of a successful year and plan where we want to take LARK in 2017. From UTS, we'll connect online with colleagues in Adelaide who plan to start a LARK chapter in South Australia. LARKs from other Australian cities, or even around the world, are most welcome to join us. 

After the meeting, people in Sydney will honour tradition and go out for dinner. It would be great if other groups want to do the same. We could exchange pictures later.

If you want to join this meeting either in person or online, please send a message to lark.kollektive_at_gmail.com with your contact details

See also Eventbrite 

Looking forward to your responses!

My journey from practitioner to researcher to published author

By Edward Luca

Sign from Luca's & Narayan's article

I started working in an academic library three years ago. At the time, I was completing my Bachelor’s degree in library and information science. The job was not as a librarian, but rather a communication officer. If you were to take the position description at face value, you could quite easily find a marketing person to write some copy and talk to other marketing people around the university. But, I was training to be a librarian and the job got me working in a library, so I was pretty pleased about it.

As I walked around my new work environment, I became increasingly interested in the experience of being in the physical library. I’ve rarely, if ever, had a truly great library interaction online. The physical space brings focus, it inspires, and it welcomes anyone and everyone. And yet it was covered in pieces of paper, with words that don’t mean anything to the average person. All these rules and instructions, which made me feel like I was in the wrong for not understanding them.

Through my LIS studies I had been exposed to the principles of Human-Centred Design, User Experience Design and Design Thinking. Don Norman, a big name in this space, writes that design needs to put human needs, capabilities and behaviour first. The process of design starts and ends with the users.

There seemed to be a chasm between this research I had studied, and what was actually happening in the library; I’ve found this disconnect to be true of LIS research and practice in general. This was certainly true of the signage in the library, and my in-house project to fix the library signage has now evolved into a peer-reviewed journal article. So how did I get here?

One of my favourite observations in Aaron Schmidt and Amanda Etches' wonderful book Useful, Usable, Desirable: Applying User Experience Design to Your Library, is that often as librarians we’ll put up a paper sign when something isn’t working well. Instead, they argue, we should aim to address the core issue which will both improve the visual environment and make the library more pleasant to use. But how do we know when something isn’t working well, and more importantly, how can we fix it? Based on the literature, I decided to use the Design Thinking approach to solve the issue. What’s so valuable about the Design Thinking approach is that it’s not just for designers; it can be used for absolutely any product or service.The library is a tremendously complex user environment, with so many different systems and processes all talking to each other. And this confusion is evident in our users! I think that anything we can do to better understand our users is a vital for a librarian, but this sort of user research is not something that we often have time for in our busy schedules.

While working through this project, I began to realise that the problems I was attempted to solve were not problems unique to our library. In fact, they seem to happen everywhere! So many libraries are covered in paper signs, have troublesome printers, hard to find rooms, or awkward checkout machines. While the size of the collection, design of the building, and range of services on offer may vary from library to library, the fundamental issues that we are trying to solve are very similar. 

As I was executing the project, I thought that perhaps there was a value to documenting our process, so that other libraries could learn from our experiences and take advantage of some of the lessons we had learned along the way. I didn’t know how to go about this. Fortunately, an LIS academic at the university had noticed our signage work and approached me with the prospect of writing a journal article about the project. I was surprised to find out that many LIS academics are on the lookout for library practitioners to collaborate with.

This was such an exciting opportunity for me, and as I thought about how an article might be structured, I began to realise that in producing the new signs I had drawn upon so much knowledge gained from my degree - ideas about user experience design, information design, observations, interviews, and even slightly tangential things like visual communication and creative writing. Not only were we able to draw upon these theoretical frameworks, but we were also able to use practice-based evidence through our own findings and experiences at the library. The research literature gives us some guidance, but we needed to validate these findings with support and evidence from our own users. 

This was also a mutually beneficial process. My academic co-author was able to conduct some practice-based research, and I received academic guidance about how to structure the project into an article with a clear conceptual framework and methodology, as I had never written a journal article before. 

This project has had a significant impact on my own practice of librarianship, while it’s also given me a much clearer idea of some of the challenges facing academics in the writing process. My co-author and I are both huge open access advocates, so the decision to look for an open access journal to publish in was an easy one. We only sent in a proposal and not the whole article, and the immediate response was very encouraging, so we decided to write it, after all.

The actual writing was the easiest bit; the work had been done. Manipulating it into a piece of writing that would be of value to any library, whilst also foregrounding the research, was much harder. What surprised me was how much time we spent considering the article conceptually. We had a clearly defined project with a successful outcome, but many afternoons were spent thinking about the conceptual framework and structure of the paper.

Feedback provided during the peer-review process was especially helpful here. For example, in our first version of the work, we’d spent more time on the specific details of our case study. After the first round of peer-reviews, we needed to reorient the work to focus on the overall process/method, which makes a much more valuable contribution to the research literature as it provides a methodology which can be applied at other libraries. The whole process from start to publication took us about six months of working together wherein we put in a total of about 40-50 hours overall, writing together and in turns.

And the day it was published? There was this huge sense of accomplishment that’s hard to describe! 

I am still very surprised by the huge positive reaction to the work. We tweeted about the article and sent it out to our networks, but were very soon seeing it picked up by staff at other academic libraries and around the world, and even by design thinking researchers, some of whom want to translate it to French. This immediate reaction is gratifying for an author, and being open access, the article is immediately readable by anyone who stumbles across it. This was also an opportunity to put into practice much of the publication literacy that librarians are engaged in: ensuring an appropriate copy is made available in the institutional repository, adding it to our researcher profiles (e.g. ORCID) and using social media for promotion. I feel that making my academic publishing debut, and already understanding these practices, will stand me in good stead for future works. 

The article was only really possible through collaboration between an academic and a library practitioner. Libraries have always been required to evolve and adapt to changing user needs. Though we certainly have a host of new issues in today’s landscape, many of these remain under-researched. It is essential that library professionals work with trained researchers from universities and elsewhere to create a body of evidence that can support contemporary needs in the profession. This experience has convinced me that LIS needs much more of this sort of collaborative research; evidence-based practice creating practice-led evidence through a conceptual research framework.

Luca, E, Narayan, B 2016, Signage by design: a design-thinking approach to library user experience, Weave: Journal of Library User Experience, 3 (5), DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/weave.12535642.0001.501

Edward Luca (AALIA) is Communication Officer at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Library, Australia

Dr Bhuva Narayan (AALIA) is Senior Lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia