Assignment X: “The User Is Not Broken”… but they might be a little confused.

Assignment X: “The User Is Not Broken”… but they might be a little confused.

Implementing participatory service to innovate children’s libraries.

 

To begin this discussion, please allow me to set the scene. Literally:

 

Dramatis Personae

(in order of appearance)

Miss Gilbert………………..……………….. a patient librarian.

Camille………………..…………………….. a curious kindergartner.

 

Act one, scene two

[The library, shortly after a read aloud of Peter Brown’s “Mr. Tiger Goes Wild” on the reading rug. Several children are darting around looking for the book they want to take back to class. Miss Gilbert and Camille are kneeling down in front of a litany of library-bound books of variable size and relevance but all bearing the same 599.7 lettering on their spines in neat white stickers]. 

 

Camille

Miss Gilbert, I want a book about tigers, please.

 

Miss Gilbert

Well, we’re in the right place! All my big cat books are right here on this shelf in front of us. Let’s see if we can find a good one, I’ve got lots about tigers!

 

Camille

(points to another book on the same shelf)

But this one is about wolves. I don’t want to read about wolves, I want to read about tigers.

 

Miss Gilbert

You’re right, it is about wolves! Our books about wolves and bears are also on this shelf, which also has the big cats.

 

Camille

That doesn’t make sense. Wolves and tigers aren’t the same animal.

 

Miss Gilbert

No, but they’re both predators – which means they hunt and eat meat – so we keep them together.

 

Camille

Why?

 

Miss Gilbert

Well, it makes the library easier for me to organize this way. That’s why all the books in the library have these little stickers, see? So I know where they go, and we can find them when students like you ask me for books about tigers.

 

Camille

That doesn’t make sense.

 

Miss Gilbert

What part doesn’t make sense?

 

Camille

I don’t know. But I want a book about tigers, not wolves. 

 

Miss Gilbert

Hm. Okay, I see. Why don’t I take all the books about tigers off this shelf and you can look them over at the table instead?

 

Camille

Okay!

 

END.

 

Please, reader, rest assured that we did find a good book for Camille on tigers that day. 

 

And, it turned out that after reading “Mr. Tiger Goes Wild” (which you can listen to me read here!), Camille decided that she really likes tigers. And so, every week, she would come up to me and ask for help finding the tiger books; so I would take her over to the same shelf, and show her the same books, and I would stare curiously (read: accusingly) at the other titles on the shelf about lions and tigers and bears and think, “Oh my. She’s right – this really doesn’t make sense, does it?” 

 

Up until this point, the plain logic behind the organization of the nonfiction section seemed uncomplicated and, as a result, blissfully unambiguous and therefore usable to me; in the neat little rows of shelves I could navigate precisely to where I needed to be. I knew where to go to return a book to its proper location, I knew where to go to pull it again if a student wanted to check it out. It was routinized and precise, which made it easy for me to navigate and, more importantly, control. 

 

The consequence of this structure is that it produced a rigid hierarchy within the library space, because I was the only one who understood the system (try as I might, I still haven’t found a way to teach the DDC to students). It oriented me (and a few kiosk-mode computers) as the sole liaison between user and content accessibility – because children, as Camille demonstrated, are naturally going to struggle to moderate and interpret a complex system when their reference queries don’t necessitate complexity. If anything, at this age, they often demand simplicity.

 

“Why,” I had to ask myself, “in a library that is purportedly designed and curated for a specific user group, is it arranged in a way that makes it easier for me, and not them?”

 

Fundamental to addressing this disorienting question is K. G. Schneider’s blog post entitled “The User Is Not Broken: A meme masquerading as a manifesto.” Her appellative thesis not only underscores the importance of user preferences in library service design, but further validates them in such a way that they necessarily outstrip all other institutional priorities. “The user is not broken,” she reports. “Your system is broken until proven otherwise” (2006). It is the system, then, that needs changing when the user no longer finds it useful – even if the librarian still might.

 

A library cannot measure its “broken”-ness without a consistent and open-minded feedback system, one that actively engages with its users to understand whether or not their needs are being met. Fargo and Young differentiate between the concept of Participatory Design, in which “collaborative decision-making amongst diverse stakeholders” (2023, pp. 13) occurs, from other like-minded user-centered design theories by emphasizing that participatory design is entirely user-focused, and does not “include further tools that do not strictly involve users” (2023, pp. 14). In studying how a library might be revolutionized for students by directly involving their visions for space and function into transformative decisions about the library, they conclude that “In positioning participatory practices as a student engagement opportunity, the library professionals can transform the relationship they have with the students in a way that produces positive social impact for both librarians and student participants” (2023, pp. 39). 

 

A report by the National Library of New Zealand sheds some light on how an institution might approach participatory design in a children’s library.  In 2011, students were polled for their thoughts about how to improve Auckland public libraries; it reports: 

 

“A dominant theme that emerged from the research was the importance of improving accessibility and ease of finding the books the children want to read. Most children confirmed that they don’t search on the computer for books but merely browse through the shelves, often choosing a book because they like its cover” (petermurgatroyd, 2013).

 

It was no wonder to me, then, that so few students ever dared to approach the biographies, when the end cap covers they saw when browsing looked like this:

So, clearly something needed to change in my own library. Two years ago we received a generous donation from our Parents’ Club to replace our old picture book shelves, and we elected to purchase a front-facing, drawered-shelf system after seeing success with students in another elementary school in the district with the same set-up. 

Knowing that this worked to help my students – especially the younger ones like Camille – find books in a more visually-focused style characteristic of elementary-aged browsing, I tested a similar method on Camille and her classmates to see if I could innovate the nonfiction animal books. I pulled some commonly-requested types of animal books off the shelves (bears, dogs, sharks, etc.) and put them in bins that could be flipped through in the same way that our picture books are, and watched to see if students would gravitate towards them any more or less than the ones aligned with the DDC categorizations.

 

And, sure enough, all of a sudden I had kindergarteners and fifth graders alike checking out books on pandas and golden retrievers and great white sharks en masse. When I asked them if they found the books easily, and if they liked having the bins, it was a resounding, “Yes, Miss Gilbert!”

 

So I asked some trustworthy students to lend me a hand and sort through all the nonfiction animal books; I let them do the majority of the sorting, because it seemed more logical for them to organize the books based on how they think they should go together rather than how I might assign them with my Dewey-fueled biases. Then, we picked out some nice bins that matched the ones we have in other areas of the library, and, in the end, “genre-fied” our collection (or, at least, this section of it).

We’re still working on the labels and organizing them properly on the shelves in a way that makes some logical sense, but insofar students have told me they’re excited about the change specifically because they took on such an active role in facilitating it – however radical it may feel to be a Dewey turncoat. Further still, I feel as though it has strengthened the trust between me as their librarian and them as my students, a gesture to that “positive social impact” central to the results of Fargo and Young’s study; somewhat paradoxically, by handing over some of the power I have over the library space to the students, it has more clearly defined our relationship as information provider and information seekers because I have demonstrated a willingness to yield to and collaborate with them to modify the library to suit their needs – importantly, it is a willingness not to forfeit but to share control over the space.

 

A helpful framework for justifying any shift in the library space I’ve made, and especially those as major as this project has been, was supplied in the lecture material for module four by Professor Stephens this week when discussion the Dokk1 Library in Denmark – “The collection did not change” when the library innovated their space (2022, 00:08:00-00:08-10), but the access to it did. The fact is that improper or inappropriate systems or structures implemented in library spaces not only inhibit a user’s ability to access information, but also their understanding of the information itself. Camille couldn’t reckon with the fact that there was a connection to be made between a tiger and wolf organizationally, and it stunted her query as she tried to make sense of it. To circle us back to the preface of this post with a neat little metaphor, there is difference between reading the script and seeing the show on stage – the information is the same, sure, but the way we configure how it is presented for our audience can drastically enhance or detract from their ability to interpret it. Being a good librarian means being aware of this reality, and understanding that “You cannot change the user, but you can transform the user experience to meet the user. Meet people where they are–not where you want them to be.” (Schneider, 2006).

 

References

Fargo, H. & Young, S. W. H. (2023, March 1). Participatory design as an approach for library assessment and student engagement. Journal of Radical Librarianship, 9, pp. 11-47. https://journal.radicallibrarianship.org/index.php/journal/article/view/66/64

petermurgatroyd. (2013, February 1). Children’s perceptions of spaces and places are vital to library design. [Blog]. National Library of New Zealand. https://natlib.govt.nz/blog/posts/children-s-perceptions-of-spaces-and-places-are-vital-to-library-design

Schneider, K. G. (2006, June 3). The user is not broken: A meme masquerading as a manifesto. [Blog]. Free Range Librarian. https://freerangelibrarian.com/2006/06/03/the-user-is-not-broken-a-meme-masquerading-as-a-manifesto/

Stephens, M. (2022). Hyperlinked library participatory service & transparency. [Lecture]. SJSU School of Information. https://sjsu-ischool.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=2a19a4b6-e945-4d2e-abf1-aef3014172a5