From the early 1990s I can remember design thinking being part of my work processes and thinking. Information organization, retrieval , display--catalogers input MARC formats and other local ILS codes so they can specifically display information a certain way to the end users.

Some of these posts about ROI bring to my mind early studies by Dr Bruce Kingma in terms of ROI studies -- this was done in 1996, The economics of access versus : the costs and benefits of access to scholarly articles via interlibrary loan and journal subscriptions --also published as Journal of Interlibrary Loan, document delivery & information supply vol. 6 no 3 1996

Haworth Press, Binghamton NY 1996 In today's online environment especially, such early ROI studies paved the way for where we are now with electronic resources. ROI and budgeting has always been a part of library practice, yes out here in the field. Right now it is especially a "hot button" because of the priorities for everyone today especially with budgeting and managing collections in our libraries, just as universities and colleges and most organizations out there today too are all asked to review budgets and find new sources of "revenue", find things to cut or do differently.

Another better example in terms of user design and libraries in the field, and in library catalogs, might be found at the libraries of North Carolina State University. SOme of you may be already familiar with their new library catalog Endeca. Other libraries also are using Endeca , which was largely based on the corporate retail world models such as Home Depot and Walmart, in terms of designing interfaces to attract business and new customers.

here are links about User Design underway at NCSU from a website I found, and also some information about Endeca at the libraries there.

Notes from the Redesign Team at NCSU

http://news.lib.ncsu.edu/redesign/

For the past several months, the Web site redesign team analyzed the information architectureof the current site, mined through usage statistics and interviewed undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty to determine a new layout and structure for the NCSU Libraries Web site.

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ENDECA Information Access Platform - ENDECA's Customers:

http://www.endeca.com/customers-overview.htm

ENDECA - online catalog at North Carolina State University Libraries

http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/endeca/

ENDECA AT THE NCSU LIBRARIES

Endeca-related Research Project Proposals

The implementation of Endeca's Information Access Platform to provide keyword searching for the NCSU Libraries catalog has generated a great deal of interest in the future of library catalogs and in faceted navigation in particular. The Endeca Product Team at NCSU Libraries has developed a list of research projects that relate to these areas. We welcome outside collaboration in exploring these topics (or others) of interest to the greater library community. If you are interested in participating in a collaborative research project, please contact Emily Lynema.

Evaluation of Faceted Catalogs

Faceted navigation has grown in popularity over the past several years, with both libraries and vendors working to develop this type of search functionality. However, open questions remain as to the effectiveness and usability of facets for different user populations and different user tasks.

What is a good methodology for evaluating whether changes in the catalog truly improve its effectiveness / user experience?
Is faceted navigation a better interface?
When (and for who) is faceted navigation effective or useful? When is it not?

FRBR-ization in the Library Catalog

FRBR promises to reduce the complexity of search results by providing the ability to collocate catalog records that represent multiple versions of the same work. However, there are few FRBR-ized search systems in production that provide a model for displaying results where aggregated work displays with multiple manifestations intermingle with work displays represented by a single manifestation.

How to design an effective user interface?
How to analyze effectiveness of algorithms for aggregating manifestations?

Subject Access via Controlled Headings

Facets populated with subject headings help expose controlled subject access points to users in a way that requires no prior knowledge of terminology. However, the use of controlled vocabulary to narrow a keyword search fails to retrieve titles that do not contain the original keyword terms. In addition, the value of cross-references in leading users to appropriate subject terminology is lost in keyword searching.

How to create an effective natural language entry vocabulary for LCSH?
How to lead users from natural language searches to appropriate LCSH when searching?

ENDECA AT THE NCSU LIBRARIES

On January 12, 2006, the NCSU Libraries announced the first library deployment of a revolutionary new online catalog. Leveraging the advanced search and Guided Navigation® capabilities of the Endeca ProFind™ platform, the NCSU Libraries' new catalog provides the speed and flexibility of popular online search engines while capitalizing on existing catalog records. As a result, students, faculty, and researchers can now search and browse the NCSU Libraries' collection as quickly and easily as searching and browsing the Web, while taking advantage of rich content and cutting-edge capabilities that no Web search engine can match.

http://library.ncsu.edu/userstudies/studies/2006_endeca_search_ncsu_catalog_round1/index.html

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 8:56 AM, Laval Hunsucker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> . . . but in any typical LIS program that
> perspective should be hard to miss in the
> students' education.

[excerpts from the post previously]

......The point, then, that I'd here like to make -- you
guessed it already, probably -- is that this kind of
"design thinking", this perspective, this thinking as
the user thinks, does seem very often very painfully
missing out here in the field, where we all practice.
Ubiquitously, and almost endemically missing, I am
inclined to say. And so long as that's the case, what
many of you may be, even systematically and
devotedly, doing back there in the classroom and
in other contacts with LIS students doesn't really
matter all that much at the end of the day, does it ?

I would guess that this same experience as my own
strongly informs the motivation for the remarks made
by Steven Bell and Bernie Sloan ( and, let's be honest,
similar ones frequently made by a great many others ).
And I'd in addition suggest that it isn't very constructive
or pertinent to object, as one LIS educator on this list
did on Sunday, that such remarks are vague, "sweeping
and simplistic", and unaccompanied by empirical test
results. Someone less generous than I might even term
such a reaction a _testimonium paupertatis_.

A following question might well be : How, then, can
it be the case that this kind of thinking, in spite of the
attention that the educators have been giving it in the
curriculum, be so little apparent, and so seldom
determinative or even operative, out here in the field ?