In the Assessment & User Experience Department, we’re always looking for ways to improve how our patrons experience the libraries’ physical and online spaces. One of our primary ways of learning about our patrons is our biennial user satisfaction survey, which we use to collect opinions from large groups of our patrons about a wide … Continue reading Where do patrons get lost? A study of library navigation.
The Assessment & User Experience department at Duke University Libraries keeps the libraries’ physical and virtual spaces responsive to user needs by constantly gathering feedback. In additional to our biennial user satisfaction survey, we run usability tests, hold focus groups, and host meetings of our student advisory boards, all in an effort to keep a … Continue reading Wrangling Messy Data with Airtable
(Thanks to Assessment and User Experience Intern Brenda Yang for this post and for her amazing work on Oasis Perkins!) What if it was possible to unwind – color, do a jigsaw puzzle, meditate – without leaving the Libraries? It is at Oasis Perkins! This high-ceilinged refuge is tucked into the fourth floor of Perkins … Continue reading Find your haven at Oasis Perkins
How can the Duke Libraries support the needs of first-generation (1G) college students at Duke? A team of library staff became interested in this question after noticing that 1G students’ responses to a survey question about the Libraries were different from those of continuing-generation students. While many 1G students are successful in and out of … Continue reading Understanding the experiences and needs of 1G students at Duke
It may only be 6 months old, but as of May 31, the SNCC Digital Gateway is sporting a new look. Since going live in December 2016, we’ve been doing assessment, talking to contemporary activists and movement veterans and conducting user testing and student surveys. The feedback’s been overwhelmingly positive, but a few suggestions kept … Continue reading The New and Improved SNCC Digital Gateway
Our modern day lives and professional endeavors are teeming with digital output. We participate in the digital ecosystem every day, contributing our activities, our scholarship, and our work in new and evolving ways. Some of that contribution gets lost in the Internet ether, and some gets saved, or preserved, in specific, often localized ways that are … Continue reading Looking to the Future of the Duke Digital Repository: Defining a Program for Digital Preservation, Management & Access
This week, my colleague Will Sexton and I (as well as several other Duke folks) are attending the Digital Library Federation conference in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. While here, we presented a poster on our work to assess scholarly use of digital collections. Please have a look at our poster below. If you … Continue reading Who Are you and Why are you Here: a Duke Digital Collections Poster
We experience a number of different cycles in the Digital Projects and Production Services Department (DPPS). There is of course the project lifecycle, that mysterious abstraction by which we try to find commonalities in work processes that can seem unique for every case. We follow the academic calendar, learn our fate through the annual budget cycle, … Continue reading FY15: A Year in Digital Projects
Our Digital Collections program aspires to build “distinctive digital collections that provide access to Duke’s unique library and archival materials for teaching, learning, and research at Duke and worldwide.” Those are our primary stated objectives, though the reach and the value of putting collections online extends far beyond. For instance, these uses might not qualify as … Continue reading The Elastic Ruler: Measuring Scholarly Use of Digital Collections
When I was a kid, one of my favorite things to do while visiting my grandparents was browsing through their collections of old National Geographic and Smithsonian magazines. I was more interested in the advertisements than the content of the articles. Most of the magazines were dated from the 1950s through the 1980s and they … Continue reading Advertising Culture
