 My name is Larry Alexander. I'm the associate university librarian for learning and teaching at the University of Michigan and with me are my colleagues Justin Schell who's the director of the Shapiro Design Lab and Megan Satar who's the director of Connected Scholarship. And we're here today to talk about our recent partnership with the University of Michigan School of Information and that partnership resulted in a collaboration around an IMLS grant called library's research lab immersive research education and engagement for LIS students and library professionals. So like many libraries, your library, our library, we're really becoming this hub of digital learning and scholarship and we're increasingly becoming a community anchor for learning research and service missions. And we recognize the need in some cases to develop and in some cases to deepen our own research skills to include systematic collection of evidence, data analysis, and interpretation. And this has become really important as we think about where scholarship is going, how our services are changing in response to that, what new services that we're developing. So in discussion with our SI partners, we really started to focus around this question of how do we realize collaborative and learning focused models to increase student engagement and critical research questions facing libraries. And we spent a lot of time working through this question and different possibilities around that. And the result was an IMLS proposal where we would intentionally create dynamic research teams that included SI faculty, librarians and graduate students. And the idea was to build structure and research methods to further apply design thinking for our library services. So the large grant, the big grant as a whole has three components to it. The first one is about the creation of library as a research lab model. So we really wanted to the work that we were going to put into this, we wanted to think about new educational approaches to building student librarian and faculty teams to really thinking about what that cohort might mean for learning and practicing and engaging in evidence based approaches to research problems. And particular those research problems within the academic library setting. So we hope that this model that we are creating is something that others could take up and adopt on their campuses and different ways that depending on their context. The second goal that we have is building research skills and professional capabilities and future academic library workforce. So what this grant is really trying to get at is building education opportunities for future librarians and current librarians and really thinking again about that application of research into our service development. And the last goal of the IMLS grant is fostering enhancing mentoring capabilities in the profession. A lot of the work that we are doing is really about mentorship. And it's not one directional mentorship, it's the entire team is really thinking through what does mentorship mean. And one of the outcomes of our grant will be it might be a handbook or a tool kit or some some mechanism to capture all the activities that we've done around mentorship so we can again share that as well. And if you want more information about the background of the grant and the details of it, if you go to the URL that's up on the website, which we always kind of laugh a little bit about of lip lab labs. But anyway, if you go to that website, there's the original grant proposal and all the other background information for the grant is there as well. So within the context of the research, the library is research lab. There are actually three distinct labs that we've created. One is around library assessment and student learning. One is around assessment for research and scholarship. And the one that Justin Megan and I have been working on is design thinking for library services. And that's really trying to think through how again how our services would benefit from design thinking and from research practices as well. So with Oh, and this is our this is our team of students. And I don't know what joke we can make, but we always joke that Justin's eyes are closed for this picture, but it's a fantastic picture otherwise, right? So with that kind of background, I want to turn it over to Megan to walk us through more the context around service design and what's been happening in our library and then Justin will take us into more specifics of the activities that the grant has been working on. Okay, thanks. So the beginning of the lab coincided with work we were doing centrally within the library around service design as a whole. We had engaged with bright spot strategy consultants who helped us develop a playbook to determine some ideas we could deploy in our services and spaces. So the playbook itself had concepts at kind of a high level that were responding to the research that bright spot did on our campus. But the idea was that each of these plays would really require additional deep dives of research and another cycle of design to develop pilots and prototypes that would allow us to actually assess the ideas that were built into those. I was part of what is called the service design task force. Three of us, my colleagues colleagues Rachel Vasek and Emily Puckett Rogers are part of that group as well. And we actually presented on that work at the 2018 fall C&I presentation and I realized I didn't put the link in this but we'll make sure it's there to make it easier if you want to go back and learn about what we were actually doing and our capacity leading those efforts. But because of the alignment time wise and mission wise with the lab, we're able to make it a node in the network of those service design efforts. So it wasn't something that was happening separate within the library. It was really part of a constellation of activities that were all focused on different service design efforts. And so the question why design thinking for library services comes up and really we were looking for new ways of seeking solutions and opening up opportunities within the organization. We didn't want to just have groups going off and doing research and presenting white papers with a very hierarchical acceptance of those ideas that would then be fully implemented within the organization. We really wanted to see us testing out smaller facets of ideas engaging with users in the process of iteration and be coming up with ways to really be dynamic in the creation of services and spaces and not getting locked into solutions. When the grant was written, I found these notes the other day that Elaine Westbrook, our AUL for research at the time, was one of the writers of the grant and she was actually inspired by a fall 2016 CNI membership meeting keynote from Ben Schneiderman about the new ABCs of research, which talks a lot about design thinking in research teams. So we saw this as an opportunity for the students for the organization and then a whole bunch of mutual benefits to enter into this work as part of that broader service design effort. For the students, they'd see their work in the grant connected to that large networked idea within the organization, which we thought would help them going into the profession to see how solutions are not implemented in a large organization. They were going to have lots of opportunities to present their ideas back within the structure of that larger project and gain feedback from across the organization while building their professional network. So they were encouraged to participate in brown bags, give updates about the progress of their research. And we also brought people into our meetings, which we'll talk more about, who could provide feedback on different aspects of a service that they were talking about. And they'd be working with real data and real outcomes in that service context. So this was taking them out of the theoretical classroom and allowing them to do research that wasn't just for traditional academic ends, but really was playing out in a real live organization. For us, it extended our capacity to respond to those bright spot recommendations by taking ideas that were there that we knew we couldn't act on right away with our staff, but that we could put into the lab for some additional work. It also brought fresh perspectives and critical reflection to our service design efforts, which has continued to really benefit all of that work. Since the students are engaging with new ideas all the time, and we're working in the same organization. So that that helps a lot. And then the benefits for both were definitely that mentoring experience. And the mentoring experience kind of brought in the student perspective of the changing role of the library, and the challenges of designing services for a diverse campus community. Justin will talk more about a project that really focused on that. So the structure of the lab, as Lori said, there's the three of us. And the first year there were two students. And the second year there were three students. Those are students from our University of Michigan School of Information. They're given a fellowship as part of this work and are expected to work 10 hours a week on this. The first year that we were engaged in this, we did biweekly meetings, which meant we had to come up with 20 hours of work for the students to do between seeing them. We went back to weekly meetings so that we can move the work along faster the second year. And there were some common experiences across the cohorts, which are kind of shown in the slide. We used this sort of framework for design thinking and the activities to guide the projects that came into the lab with both cohorts. So the students would have an opportunity to explore issues and do some analysis. So this included user experience mapping, empathy mapping, persona development, interviews, and contextual analysis. They got to do creative things that they didn't expect they were going to be able to do in terms of generating and exploring ideas, such as sketching and storytelling. And then the synthesis of those ideas into actual pilots and prototyping activities that we would put out into the organization to test the concepts. At the end of each cohort's time in the lab, there was a symposium across the lab, so they did a poster presenting their work. And there was a monthly hands-on meeting across those three labs that Lori talked about, where the students shared out progress on the work that they were doing, as well as having either a guest speaker or one of the librarians in the lab talk about a fundamental research concept, introducing tools like EnVivo or thinking about how to design a good poster in a research setting. So the first year, we had two wonderful students, Ben Ririk and Heather Shukraft. The first year was actually really only a semester that lasted from January to April, so we were working in a more condensed period of time. We had the advantage that both students actually had connections to our work already. Ben had worked with Justin in the design lab. The design lab being kind of a community-driven learning environment that takes in projects for innovation and particular themes like libraries or accessibility or citizen science. And Heather was actually a part-time school of information student who also worked in our technical services department, so we got a unique view of sort of the services and spaces we were talking about from her location within the organization. So what they were given was the research scholar hub play, and this is a page out of that playbook from Brightspot. So the play itself is just a short description of what the research is telling us, and then below that, and cut off in this image, are the drivers, why they're suggesting this needs to be addressed, requirements, what might be pieces of it, and next steps. So one of the next steps, the first bullet there, is currently there is not much understanding of what graduate students are looking for, so that gave us a big wide door to walk through as we sent the students into the design thinking framework to approach this. So they started off with some guidance from us, but we let them really drive the direction of the lab with this big broad question of how might the library meet the research and teaching needs of graduate students. Within the semester they embarked on, they learned about user experience mapping, how to do a good interview, and brought that work out onto campus, and you can kind of see how those activities line up with that framework. Because we are working in a very discreet amount of time from January to April, this was a very limited deep dive, sort of a shallow deep dive, I guess, one way of thinking of it. So within the time that we had with them, they did have time to kind of draft personas based on the research data that we already had from BrightSpot, they created an interview protocol, they waited weeks while we waited to get our IRB exemption, and one of the really interesting things with the IRB piece was that in presenting what we were going to do and using the language of design thinking as our mode of scholarship, it took weeks to get the IRB done because they kept coming back to us and asking questions about what are you really going to do, and because of the way they were expecting some of the more traditional research methods to appear in the IRB, like our colleagues in the library assessment for research and assessment for learning labs, they had to smooth their time with that, so it was a good learning experience for us that we really needed to be very explicit when putting this kind of work through the IRB. They did a small set of student interviews from across disciplines, and then expert interviews with academic support areas on campus, like the Rackham Graduate School and other offices connected to that. So at the end, when they built out their themes for that graduate student experience, they saw things coming up like students wanted to build connections, they were uncertain and they needed a validation. There was the importance of their past research experience as they were arriving on campus, to how well they felt they would succeed or not succeed in their first research projects. They wanted to see the sharing of best practices and resources for their research and studying, and they lacked guidance on pathways to take in their careers. So with those things in place, we did one round of idea generation before the end of the lab, and it left us with more focus around the steps we might take to test out some of these ideas and pursue more focused engagement and service development for graduate students. The work is kind of in the parking lot right now. We don't have a dedicated unit that's looking at the graduate student experience, and so it's really something where we would need to pull a team together to focus on this. But the two ideas that they came up with were good ones. They thought about the idea of a research identity researcher identity program that would help small groups with shared interests learn from PhD students, faculty, and librarians with more experience. So kind of creating a hub for both mentorship and collaboration, and they envisioned kind of a grad pathways tutorial slash game that would be an online environment that allowed newer students to explore resources and service that the library offers and think about career outcomes as well. So these weren't things that we were going to take action on, but we have them in the parking lot and we are ready to work with them again once we decide that the graduate student experience is going to be a focus, more of a focus of our service design that it currently is. So the students did create posters for that research symposium, and it talked about gaining skills that they were able to apply to other challenges. Specifically Heather talked about designing new workflows and her technical services unit where she works around troubleshooting e-resources and communicates a lot with public services staff and she thought about how persona development and user experience mapping might actually help that situation to think about all of the players, all of the stakeholders in the work of reporting an e-resource is not working and then getting it fixed. So they managed to refine their question to doing those interviews and left us with a much richer question to take into any additional deep dives we do by asking how might the library strengthen the connections among graduate students to enhance the research experience. So even within that one semester of research they really gain skills in iterating upon an idea and providing using the tools of design thinking to get to new solutions. So moving into year two we saw an opportunity to connect the next cohort to another service design related project and I'll turn it over to Justin to talk about that. I'm the audio nerd I run the audio studio in the lab as well as the podcast so I'm making sure everything is okay. So in our year two cohort we actually had a full year with the students which was really great we still are with in that year for a couple more weeks. So we have three SI students both second year master students Jordan Grozowski, Sophia McFadding Kiesling and Caroline Weck. And so these three students came from a variety of different backgrounds you know some of them had worked professionally for a while some were interested in community colleges and we're interested in academic libraries and so the projects that we worked on with this group sort of built on some of the aspects of of the previous year and sort of seeking out those connections and better understanding users as sort of part of the design thinking process. And what it really we really focused on was partnering with another project which was this library life cycle project which we'll talk more about in a second but if you've done any sort of persona work or things like that in academic library or in academic institution you usually see the sort of undergraduate graduate and faculty sort of breakdown these are the three communities that you know conventional personas are developed around. And of course you know you can have a lot of different definition within the so undergrad. Dan is a first year undergrad studying biology you know struggles to manage this time you can do research effectively etc etc. But we knew that these were very limited in how they represented the community of the University of Michigan. And so with this library life cycle project oh where'd the poster go? Oh it was... There's a beautiful poster. There's a beautiful poster that is entitled The Tragedy of Faculty Frank. And how this project came about was doing I think 35 or 40 interviews with different people that were you know had a variety of different backgrounds and being able to better understand this broader community of users and just community generally that use the library that are on campus. And so as we're thinking about designing services as part of the service design task force who would we be leaving out when we start thinking of this? If we're thinking of this in a more traditional way when we have those sort of three personas sometimes it's just student you know so maybe you don't even differentiate between graduate and undergraduate student. And so the three students Jordan Caroline and Sophia sort of picked up the sort of low fi prototype that the library life cycle project developed which was a sort of game exercise we ended up calling it a gum exercise because we couldn't really there each iteration of user testing people found a problem with either calling it a game or an exercise and so I think we ended on exercise because there was less objection to it. And so they took this and started developing you know how could this then be used for library staff as they're thinking through designing new services. So the point of this you know from taking these really really rich interviews that were then sort of condensed down into a series of I statements how could library staff be able to figure out their own sort of blind spots or gaps in their knowledge of different user communities on campus. And so from that starting point they went through a variety of iterations some you know post-it notes hand drawn cards things like that and then finally what we'll show you in a second which is the well I sort of briefly showed you already the the final version that's more of like a high-five prototype which is called unseen exploring users campus experiences and I have a feeling nope it's not the poster just disappeared so it goes. So we had a variety of different cards one of the inspirations for the original library life cycle group was this VA project that would give people these sort of stacked identity characteristics and so like I'm a veteran I'm you know I have I have a disability I have you know low income or things like that and you could sort of move these different characteristics around and create these different personas that would result in sort of different levels of thinking required to how best to support them. And so from taking these I statements and take and then sort of moving them into these sort of cards that you could you would get a number of cards as you're sort of going through the exercise and this would allow you to sort of not necessarily like put yourself in their shoes but be able to think about okay well what elements of this am I not thinking about in the service that I'm designing. And so we have a variety of cards here these sort of identity based cards beyond you know sort of race gender sexuality to include health and ability and disability financial status sort of why I came to the U of M study style things like that to really capture that fuller picture that more holistic picture of the student we were primarily focused on undergraduate students at this point but we could see this being more broadly applicable to other students beyond the undergraduate community. So the way that just to hear some examples so there are I think ranging from seven to 10 or so cards for each topic and so one of them is health so I have a chronic health condition which requires regular attention to manage so there's both a sort of a character aspect that you have but then also some things to think about that sort of prompt you know your own thoughts but then because this is is gone through as a group this also can spark some conversation beyond just you sort of reflecting on this in a sort of a single solitary environment. So if I have this condition you know what do I have to prioritize do you have access to the health care things you need does this require time away from class and so this is sort of taking a step back from and this is something that we went through a lot was when do we actually start bringing the library into this at what point do they okay well do we need to think about how they get access to articles as part of this or is this just figuring out okay the you know these folks are part of this community and just better understanding this as a first step and then going forward to the library services element so I'm already minority race important part of your identity do you feel privileged you encounter prejudice or stereotypes on campus due to your race there's also you know why I came to the University of Michigan for a lot of folks it's because they had someone in their family come to it come to the university you know I'm non-binary so things to think about with this some previous schooling you know some some of these cards you know I did not go to a very rigorous high school and that would change how they think about studying and you know and one of the you know one of the scenarios they're they're really struggling because they haven't had to work as hard you know sort of perception of as hard as they did in high school as they do now at at the university and then financial and different different students who are more financially flexible or or privileged than others and so all of these cars that are passed out to participants you're also given a two game pieces which we 3D printed in the design lab they're those sorry pieces and and so at each each stage of this you're you're supposed to mark in two places one as how seen you you feel on campus as well as how safe you feel on campus and so you can you start this from a more general perspective from you having you know this sort of this identity and I should say one of the big questions around calling this a game was making a game out of people's identities and that's something that we struggle with and it was something that we brought up early on we worked with a variety of user groups including our library library diversity council and again we sort of got mixed kinds of results and feedback from that but ultimately we chose not to call this a game even and but one of the interesting things was some people wanted it wanted it to be if it's a game like they wanted to win somehow it's like no no no we don't you know Kathleen's talk like we don't all need to win or like we all win we all do better when we all do better you know come on and so as they're sort of going through this they are given sort of these two cards one is a personal event card so something happens to you this could be a change in health it could be a change in finance or something like that and then you have to adjust your position on the board because of that and then the other one is like a campus event so hateful graffiti graffiti on campus I really like that it just says content it's you know the formalists are really upset and the other ones it's like you know Michigan wins a national championship or something like that shout out to the gymnastics team that just did that I think and and so at each of those points then you sort of move this piece you know around the board sort of you know do you feel seen do you not feel seen do you feel safe do you not feel safe and all of this is an invitation towards the conversation and the reflection within that group and so being able to now that we've you know they've developed this sort of high-five prototype and a very elaborate what's what's the guide facilitation guide for it this can now be used for lots of different folks in the library to start thinking about you know who they might be missing sort of akin to sort of Heather Heather's idea about you know workflows and creating different kind of workflows like who's who's not in those conversations now but this is at a much broader level and sort of how we interact with the broader community you know not just on campus but I think more broadly than you know than in Ann Arbor in Southeast Michigan and and beyond so you you breathe like you're gonna say something and so we wanted to as we've sort of gone through this we wanted to to make sure that some of the students' voices that were part of this as well because you know Laurie mentioned earlier that mentoring was a big part of this and you know we had lots of sessions of just like tell me about your career like how did you get to where you are again the sort of informal thing that's not like okay you need to do this to be a good graduate so you need to do this to get a job and some of that extended to you know what should I eat at an interview dinner like what's a good interview dinner like okay cool like here's the thing do I drink do I not drink like okay well let's you know and sort of some of that more practical advice but it was also a lot of you know I think sort of confidence building and them as you know yeah you can totally go get that job and and being and thinking about what you know a good first job might be what a good first a good first job might not be in terms of responsibilities and environments and things like that so providing some of that that they may not have gotten in their their classes or just sort of amongst their own their friends or their colleagues or things like that and so cool and so in wanting to showcase some of their voices reflecting on both sort of the mentoring piece how they they learned as part of this and there's a more general reflections I stepped into our our studio our small studio and shot short video interview with both of them and cut that together so shout out this whole process has been really good for me personally just from starting out at our lab specifically I was kind of wowed with the three mentor librarians that we had because they had so much knowledge and they brought so much information and skill to the table and I felt like oh crap I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to do that but along the way I've kind of learned and watched what they've done and how they've sort of tackled the problems that we've come into and I feel like it's given me a lot of tools for my big career toolkit I guess I would say my library toolkit has a lot of the stuff that I've learned in the SI program so how to answer reference questions how to do good research how to build a website in Drupal that sort of stuff but then from this experience I've learned the design thinking process so I've now added that into my like my big library toolkit that's something I can take with me on out of here and then also just learning how to not be attached to your ideas which I think is part of the design process but I think this lab did a really good job of actually doing that where it got to the point throughout the process where I don't remember which ideas were mine and which were my collaborators because I just feel like we all have ownership in this but we all also weren't attached to it in a way that was toxic I've learned about the thought process for coming up with library programming coming up with ideas of how to add to that larger design goal that larger goal of creating a new culture for the library is very interesting trying to come up with games and exercises for that I've never I've never tried to create a tangible tool for helping people get to a goal of compassion and empathy before so I think that was really unique about this position this experience has been a really cool way to get to be creative which is something that I feel like creativity is kind of missing from a lot of our courses where you know you have a project and you are just kind of following the steps that have been outlined and you're you're working towards a rubric and so this sort of real-world experience was a really cool way for us to determine what are the deliverables and how are we going to get there and do hands-on project management in a way that worked for our team it allowed us to exert some sort of creative expression over it I really appreciated just the opportunity to grow and actually have an opinion being a graduate student and so not having really that much experience in libraries but being able to be part of the conversation for future library design was really empowering I think that that is not always granted to students and so I really appreciated the respect and being told like this is a non-hierarchical environment we're working in where everyone is able to share their ideas and have their ideas discussed and have sort of go through the process of having ideas accepted and moving on to a prototyping stage and then having learning how to be okay with just like letting go of your idea too because it's going to develop and change as you go and I think that's a really important skill that not everyone is able to learn at the beginning of their career because they're not able to have an idea also at the beginning of their career too which is very beneficial and I've just gotten a lot of like self-confidence out of this whole experience just seeing like okay you can start from not knowing anything and then along the way you can learn a lot and then just as long as you're learning and holding onto that knowledge that you're picking up along the way it's going to prepare you better for the job field I didn't know that something like this existed in a library I thought I was going to be looking at reference librarian positions and just how to best answer library questions and how to best find information for people but I think because of this experience I've started to look more at design and libraries and more of service in libraries and how I can have an impact there how I can help overhaul services and design better for users essentially so user experience in libraries is kind of what I've learned through this whole process that that exists that I like it and that it is sort of an emerging field that I feel like I'm much more prepared for now the library is research lab project gave me kind of a behind the curtain view of what this process really looks like in an academic library I think my classes are really good at you know theoretically saying that oh librarians are on a ton of committees and it's a very collaborative environment but going and working on this project in the library I was really able to see that firsthand and was able to get a sense of you know what an innovative library's priorities are and how they're working together and collaborating and so that's been really good as I go on interviews because I've been able to I think ask more impressive questions and really interview the place that I'm interviewing at in a more informed way I'm able to you know ask what committees I would be on and what this library is doing in terms of initiatives that I've become aware of and been really excited to work on through this program yeah I mean this was a great experience I loved it it changed my career outlook of kind of what I want to do so I'm still searching for the right job so hire me we should say they're all in the market as I've now watched that too many times and cutting it together the piece about letting go of your ideas should not be taken as a give us your idea so we can use them and not credit you I could see how that is that could be interpreted that way but they will are all creating posters they have different presentations coming up on this and so if you're interested in and seeing more of their work once they create the posters which I think they're doing this week we're happy to send that to you so I think that about reps oh yes yeah because you think we didn't see the poster but Denise Layton and Cat King and Shayla Garcia were three of our librarians who did that library is life cycle project um and you know created just so many pieces of paper you know sort of chopping up the interview statements and things like that and really provided us a really great foundation for you know this project to be as successful as it was so I'm not sure where that poster went but we can we can send out that as well I think that's so nothing else I think you can check out that site which I'm not going to read the URL because it makes me laugh every time but we'd love to hear your questions and thank you you