Pam McKinney here live blogging from the lilac conference. This presentation from Cathryn Peppard. at the royal college of nursing focused on the challenges of supporting a nationwide body of users with IL teaching. They used Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development” to conceptualise the needs of users, so reflecting on what learners already know, and the tasks they can do unaided and using this to identify what their learning needs are. They used a UX approach to develop resources, each participant was given a topic to search on the CINAHL database, and told them to look for helping the library website with this search. The participants then engaged with the online help, and then repeated their search. The team then interviewed the participants about their experiences. They used a online poll to ask the lilac audience what format they would choose for a self help resource, choosing from video, pdf guide or interactive resource. The results were a fairly evenly split. The participants for the UX research were from a range of professional contexts: students, nurses, academics and retired members. Students were the most comfortable with the searching activity, as they were probably doing this kind of activity anyway. One participant had never used CINAHL before, and it was good to have a range of abilities. There was no real difference again the kind of help they would like, but generally they wanted help resources that would be quick to access (for them!). Participants liked to have help with the process of searching e.g. in identifying synonyms. The research showed that participants didn’t immediately go to the “support” section of the website because they thought it was about IT support rather than support for literature search. One key reflection was that these self-help resources worked as an adjunct to library workshops, not as a replacement. Speed of access was important, so the team are planning on developing a suite of very short videos that are no more than a couple of minutes long. Also, the pdf guides were more popular than originally thought.
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