#31 “How can we make the students feel it’s their library, not ours?” Kristin Meyer about her work as an UX librarian

Grand Valley State University library is famous for their radically student centered building and library. Kristin will tell us the story of one library that wants to create a permission culture, is working with iterative improvements and is asking themselves: How does this benefit our users? Although they had a brand new, beautiful and expensive building, they realized that they had to find ways of working that adapted to change and picked up new user needs and behaviours. This led to development of unique ways to serve students.  And as Kristin says: There is a difference between caring about users and actually being proactive. Learn more: Boisvenue-Fox, M., & Meyer, K. (2019). Not what you expected: Implementing User Experience (UX) and design thinking techniques as a library leadership model. In J. Crum (Ed.), Advances in Library Administration and Organization supporting entrepreneurship and innovation (p.p. 7-20). Bingley, West Yorkshire: Emerald Publishing.             Meyer, K., & Torreano, J. (2017). The front face of library services: How student employees lead the library at Grand Valley State University. In C. Tomlinson & S. Arnold-Garza (Eds.), Students lead the library: The importance of student contributions to the academic library (pp. 39-56). Chicago, IL: Association of College and Research Libraries. Retrieved from http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/library_books/11/ Rodriguez, J. C., Meyer, K., & Merry, B. (2017). Understand, identify, and respond: The new focus of access services. portal: Libraries and the Academy: (Special issue) Public services and user engagement, 17(2), 321-335. Retrieved from https://muse.jhu.edu/article/653207 Kristin Meyer: User Experience Librarian and Area Lead for Strategic Planning at Grand Valley State University Hosts: Karin Ljungklint och Kristin OlofssonProducer:  Sofia ToivonenSound engineer: Magnus AxelssonRecording: This episode is recorded remotely using the conference tool Zoom, the computers’ inbuilt microphones and headset. The audio is cut and edited in Adobe Audition.