Handouts from Marie Radford's presentation

At the May 8 meeting of the Virtual Reference SIG, Marie Radford gave a presentation on the interpersonal dimensions of the interaction between patron and librarian in chat reference. I've just uploaded her handouts onto the SIG's wiki.

Chat librarians as "psycho killers"?

Check out Marie Radford's post on Library Garden detailing some of the findings from her focus groups with New Jersey's "screenagers" about their information seeking behaviors. One surprising (to me, at least) finding was that:

All groups were also extremely wary of chat situations as being potentially unsafe. These unknown and unfamiliar chat librarians were seen as potential “psycho killers” (yes, that’s a quote!).

Information archictecture is more than web design

Having just read Peter Merholz' closing plenary address at the IA Summit 2006 (PDF) and re-reading about the work that the firm MAYA did for the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, I'm becoming more intrigued by the idea that information architecture might be better conceived as a term with broader implications that web design. As a simplistic example of where such thinking leads you, consider MAYA's recommendation that the reference desk sign in the library be changed to match what's on the web site: Ask a Librarian. There's much more to this idea than this simple example, which makes it seem like it's just a matter of putting in new signs. It's also about considering at a deep level how it is that your users experience their search for information in your physical and virtual environments.

As I've been involved in the work of redesigning our library's web site, I've also become intrigued by the burgeoning research and theorizing in the are of "user experience." For more on that, start with the User Experience Network and James Melzer's blog post, which offers a refinement of Peter Morville's "facets of user experience" diagram.

Now that I've finished up my master's essay in history at Hunter College (on McCarthyism and libraries) and will be graduating next week, I've got time to delve more deeply into a bunch of ideas that have had to sit on a mental backburner for the past year. Thanks to the world of blogs bringing all these ideas to me while I've been otherwise occupied, I've been able to maintain at least a passing familiarity with some of the developments in the world of information architecture and user experience. I hope to go back to all those bookmarked posts I had been assiduously collecting and finally begin digesting them (my summer beachtime reading).

UPDATE: The audio of Peter Merholz' plenary address is available (MP3).