Last Supper for Librarians in Milan?
Just back from a day long event in Milan on Digital Library Futures: User Perspectives and Institutional Strategies. I was there as the co-leader of Work Package 3 in the ATHENA project.
The day was part of the World Library and Information Congress, 75th IFLA General Conference & Assembly - Libraries create futures: Building on cultural heritage, and took place in the Magna Aula of the Università degli studi di Milano.
As the title suggests there were two themes which can be summerised as:
- How are users behaving in the ‘digital universe’, including the digital library;
- What are libraries going to deal with the challenges.
The first session, Digital Library User Experience: a focus on current user research, was perhaps the most intriguing session. In it:
- Professor David Nicholas, Director of Department of Information Studies and CIBER,
University College London gave the highlights of his group’s research into how users behave on the web and especially how they search; - Daniel Teruggi, INA / Chair of Europeana User Group focussed on how Europeana is addressing user needs;
- Elke Greifeneder, Lecturer, Berlin School of Library and Information Science,
Humboldt‐Universität zu Berlin gave her analysis of how reasearch is carried out into user needs analysis coming to the depressing conclusion that nearly half of the studies do not meet their design goals.
The Prof Nicholas’ research was particularly interesting as it found that users:
- Wanted the answers on the first page of a results page;
- Would not go deep into a results set;
- Were happy with a ‘failed search’ - they assumed there wasn’t an answer;
- Moved horizontal through the Web from link to link and did not go deeply into site.
His most telling phrases were: “The future is here now“ and “We are all the Google Generation”
The latter emphases the fact that we all act, in some circumstances, in some contexts, like the young student researcher.
Finally the sobering thought for librarians was the lack of want for ‘meadiated search’ one of the major tasks of the librarian.
