Libraries expend a majority their limited human and financial resources to bring new products and services to their customers. However, libraries STILL have the tendency to wait until these products or services are ‘prefect’ ready before they are officially released. The rapid change in technology and the pressures of external ‘competition’ is requiring libraries to shorten their service lifecycles. The number of libraries discussing the concepts of agile development, perpetual beta, and rapid prototyping is encouraging. The one thing that all of these approaches have in common is including customers as active participants in the development and/or testing of new products and services. To that end, a growing number of libraries have been building “Library Labs,†which are based on the Google Labs concept. This approach to service development was discussed in the presentation “Building a Web-Based Laboratory for Library Users†by Jason J. Battles and Joseph (Jody) Combs. The…
Tag: lita2008
Do They Really Know What They Need?
User-Centered Design for Humanities Collections within a Digital Library – LITA Forum 2008 Mark Phillips and Kathleen Murray, University of North Texas presented jointly on the challenges, goals and outcomes of user-centered design for humanities collections within a digital library. A link to their presentation is here. Mark is the Head of the Digital Projects Unit and has been involved with software development and digital content creation for the Portal to Texas History. Kathleen is a postdoctoral research associate working in the Digital Projects Unit at the University of North Texas Libraries. She has been involved in state-wide and national digital library projects and has presented at major library and information science conferences in the areas of needs assessment, digital libraries, and web archiving. Mark and Kathleen took turns presenting the challenges. Mark started by giving the technical background of the IOGENE project. They had to take this in three…