Hi everyone, my name is Sarah Crissinger and today I am going to be talking to you about my experience doing a practicum at GSLIS. I hope share what I learned but also how it changed my professional practice and the way I see the academic library.

I should first note the intention of this presentation. In academia, our goal is often to make our case study or our empirical research or other forms of scholarship generalizable. In fact, that's often the point. While I hope this presentation and the resources I share are applicable to others and their practice, I should also be clear that I'm using this space to reflect on my learning, hence the "my" in my title. I hope that by writing about, talking about, discussing my practicum I am able to continue to learn about the nuances of my experience and challenge the pre-conceived notions I had/ still have.

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon2/pedagogy/pedagogychapter3.html

Cate and Melinda, the UX team at Pixo at the time, allowed me to complete the 100 hours there. They are currently taking one practicum student/ year. This model was all about mentorship-- it wasn't just about them feeding me information.
- I often shadowed their meetings, workflow, leadership roles, teamwork & communication styles
- I was responsible for teaching myself about analytics and writing a report about how it applies to Pixo's business model
- I talked to them about my experience in the academic library and how tools/ tips applied to that
- I learned through teaching others: pop-up usability lab

What does this have to do with the academic library?

- I would argue this is something the academic library has been doing for quite awhile-- user stories for gateway, Asher and ethnography, LibGuides 2.0 testing

- Academic libraries have always cared about the user's experience & making sure that community is present, obstacles to getting information

Through my practicum at Pixo, I found that while we are doing this work, we aren't doing it in a holistic way.

SELFIN and Aaron Schmidt-- map out "touchpoints"

Notice in the first six steps here, the patron hasn't interacted with one staff member. Our presence goes beyond our physical presence.

http://www.servicedesigntools.org/tools/8
https://twitter.com/walkingpaper

Additionally, we sometimes stay within the building blocks of UX (understand users) w/ personas or focus groups. But don't beyond to see what other libraries are doing/ what we can learn from them, doing in-depth content analyses, etc.

WE HAVE TO EVALUATE WHAT WE DO!

http://www.nngroup.com/people/kathryn-whitenton/

Contact me!

This presentation is an extension of a blog post I wrote. Check it out!