Off-Campus Library Services Conference (Day 1)

Hi CUC!

I have just thoroughly enjoyed my day at the Off-Campus Library Services Conference in Salt Lake City. All the new information I've been exposed to is truly invigorating! Not to mention the beautiful snow-covered mountains surrounding me create quite a setting for learning.

The first workshop I attended was "Usability Testing of Library Web Sites," presented by Stefanie Buck and Jon Dillon of Western Washington University Libraries. In addition to learning about a variety of user tests that can be useful when redesigning a library's website, us librarians attending the workshop had the opportunity to actively participate in the Task Oriented Testing model. For this type of usability testing a test user sits with a moderator who keeps track of every step in the user's search path to learn more about how others may be using the library website. Also, while the user is clicking from page to page, they verbalize their thought process. Although this is not a new model of testing, it can provide great insight into user interpretations of different functions within a library's website (for example, to accomplish the task of finding an article for their research, where do they go on the website to try to do this?).

In addition to learning about strategic planning for user testing as well as a myriad of ways a library can accumulate user testing data for analysis purposes, I also learned some about different remote testing software for implementing user testing with distance education students.

Following this workshop, I attended a discussion about how one academic librarian uses Camtasia for developing screencasts, including online tutorials that demonstrate how to use different databases. To view an example of how libraries can use Camtasia to create online tutorials, visit http://www.library.ubc.ca/scieng/videos/library_research.html. There's also a Camtasia video that is actually about Camtasia functionality, created by Jeff Ward (Highline Community College) at http://tinyurl.com/4e2uo6.

Lots of possibilities, and there's still two more days to go with this conference! :)

Thanks for reading,
Annie

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