Participatory Design of Academic Libraries

Participatory design is a process by which the people who will use a space, a service, or a tool are involved in its conceptualization and development. Traditionally, a narrow range of experts, such as architects, engineers, or computer scientists, decided what people needed and how it would be built. Even today, library buildings and especially catalogs and other library technology are built in this traditional way, and this is why they are often so hard to use. The alternative is to consider that the people who use libraries are experts in an important sense: they are expert in how they do research. In academic libraries, the participatory design process allows us to capture information about how people do scholarly work and how that work may best be supported. In this talk, I will argue for the quality and value of the information we gather as part of the participatory design process. I will explain how we collect information through photo elicitation, mapping activities, workshops and traditional interviews; how it can help us understand the academic work process and how people learn of and obtain information; and how libraries and universities can use such design processes to help their researchers do their best work and their students make the most of their academic opportunities