LITA Persona Task Force
The Persona Task Force was appointed by LITA (Library and Information Technology Association) Board in January 2016 to better capture the varied interests, needs, and expectations of the current, future, and past LITA members. These personas were developed as a tool that will help LITA create and refine tangible benefits and actionable strategies that directly address those interests, needs, and expectations.
Personas
Based on data analysis from existing data and user research (see below in the Data Collection section), the Task Force came up with 9 personas.
1. New Member: Jason Creek
2. LITA Involvement Member: Rachel Stein
3. Admin-Level Member: Jennifer Torre
4. Techie Librarian: Amy Chuck
5. Librarian: Michael Zhang
6. Non member – Previous Member: Andrew Young
7. Non Member – LITA Events Participant: Steve Gonzalez
8. Non Member – Online Follower: Rebecca Miller
9. Non Member – No Connection: Carol English
Next Step: How the Personas Will Be Used
The LITA membership personas were developed to improve the overall user experience of LITA members. In February 2017, the LITA Board asked LITA committees and interest groups to select and rank three LITA member personas that are most relevant to them and to submit a concrete action suggestion(s), which each committee or interest group would like to pursue. This will allow the LITA Board to collect a good number of concrete use case scenarios for these personas and review those use cases in relation to the LITA 2016-2018 strategic plan. The LITA Board plans to select, prioritize, and implement high-impact use cases through committees and interest groups and continue to rely on the LITA personas in order to improve the overall LITA experience for its members.
Timeline and Task Force Membership
The Task Force had the first virtual meeting in February and ran through Midwinter 2017. There were 11 members, including liaison to the following LITA committees:
- Membership
- Assessment and Research
- Communications and Marketing
- Board
Task Force members:
- Hong Ma (Co-chair)
- Yoo Young Lee (Co-chair)
- TJ Lamanna
- Frank Skornia
- Callan Bignoli
- Lynne Edgar
- Amanda L. Goodman
- Bohyun Kim (Liaison to the LITA Board)
- Isabel Gonzalez-Smith
- Nadaleen Tempelman-Kluit
- Mark A. Beatty, Staff Support
Data Collection
1. Gathering Existing Data
The Task Force gathered existing data as much as possible. The data sets included sanitized LITA 2016 membership data – which contained only job title, city, state, organization type, work area, position, and membership type – sanitized LITA Forum attendee data from 2011 to 2015 – which contained only job title, city, state, organization type, and membership type – annual reports, tech-related job postings, surveys, evaluations, and work reports like 2011 LITA Emerging Leaders Project “Branding LITA: A Market Identity for the 21st Century” and the President’s Message: UX Thinking and the LITA Member Experience written by Rachel Vacek.
2. User Research
The Task Force conducted 11 in-person interviews with current LITA members at the 2016 ALA Annual Conference in Orlando, FL from June 23 to June 28 for preliminary research. With help from the LITA staff, the Task Force reached out to attendees for voluntary participation in the interview. Each interview lasted between 30 to 70 minutes.
The Task Force also developed an online survey and distributed it to the following listservs from September 1 to October 3 to aim to collect opinions from current and past LITA members as well as non-members:
- LITA-L
- LITA Blog
- LITA Social Media (Twitter and Facebook)
- Code4Lib-L
- Alma-L
- Primo-L
- Voyager-L
- NMRT-L
- IACRL
- LibUX Slack Channel
- Local Boston/New England Library Tech Groups
- New England Chapter of ASIS&T
- Greater Boston LibTech’rs Meetup Group
The total respondents were 477, but only 379 responses were valid to be analyzed further. Out of 379 respondents, 155 were current LITA members while 224 were either previous members or non-members. In addition, 73 volunteers were willing to participate in the follow up study.
The Task Force identified some missing areas like personal characteristics. The customized follow up short survey was sent out to 73 volunteers from November 28 to December 12 and 16 of them replied back.