 All right welcome back everybody. This is Michael, Laura and Krista here at the Nebraska Library Commission and welcome to session three of Big Talk from Small Libraries 2014. We're going to switch gears here a little bit and this session is entitled You Can Cue Using Cue Method to Understand Community Needs for Small Libraries. This is presented by Mary Jordan, an assistant professor at Simmons College GS LIS program. Prior to entering academia, she worked in a small public library as a director and administrator. Her research and consulting work now focuses on ways to help libraries to function better and serve the communities more effectively. Mary go ahead and take it away. Hi everybody. I'm really excited to be here. Thank you so much and I've definitely been enjoying the conference so far. So as I said that I am a former small public library person so I'm kind of familiar with some of the needs and the problems that small public libraries had and I know one of the issues that I constantly had was need to try to evaluate all of my services and evaluate what we were doing and try and find out what my community wanted but I didn't have well the time and I didn't have the expertise to make all of this happen. So I came into the idea of Cue Method and into the idea of academia in general as a way to sort of understand what I was doing here and how I could work with my libraries better. So when you're thinking about Cue Method it's just a strategy. It's just a tool that you could use to do those things to help evaluate your services to help find out what's going on in your community and to help sort of reach out to people. I'm going to let, if people want to jump in with questions, I think the organizers might be able to read them to me and I'm going to save time at the end for more questions but just thinking about yourselves and I'm sort of engineering you all right now. I don't know how many of you have tried to get about surveys in your library. Hands raised. Yes, I see you there. Good. And they work sometimes but I was always really frustrated with surveys because you asked those questions of well tell me on a scale of one to five how do you like our circulation or how do you like how quickly ILLs come in and everybody always said either five. They loved everything. Everything was great. Everything was wonderful which of course I love to hear but that's not necessarily helpful or they would say things like well we're angry about today and so we don't like anything. That's also not terribly helpful. So what Cue Method does is in fancy statistical language it lets you blend sort of qualitative and quantitative ideas and it lets you come out with some really impressive statistical ideas but it's honestly it's really easy and it's really fun for your patrons to do. It's something a little bit different and it's something that's going to encourage people to want to share their ideas with you which is always an issue but knowing that this is a nice reliable valid statistical methodology it gives you lots of really fancy data and cool numbers and things and that's something you can always share with your funders with your people in your community. It just it lets everybody know you know what you're doing. You're asking for things for more money for some program or you're asking for assistance in bringing in some other kind of equipment because you very clearly know that this is what your community members want. So I'm going to start off just by looking at what you get at the end of a Cue Method which is groupings of your respondents which I'm just going to say patrons because I'm going to assume that most of my Cue studies have been on library patrons and that's probably what yours will be too. So and I felt like this was this was probably a topic we could all kind of relate to. We're not academic librarians but we probably all know a little something about stress in libraries. So when I talked to and sent out Cue Methods to academic libraries from around the country they came up what I ended up with was three different groupings of people who were stressed out by different things in their workplace. So the first one is probably something many of us can relate to. It's just all these people everything that's constantly going on it's their family they have issues with their their home life that are bleeding over into work life they have issues with the people who are coming in they have issues that they don't have enough personal space they have issues with the students they have to work with it's just it's a lot and in this group of people these are the things that we discovered they were most stressed out about. Knowing this means then that you as you know an administrator as a manager you as a team member who's working to help solve this problem in your library you could take these answers and help build a program to design for these people. So the next group of people that the next group of people who had stressors the things that they were stressed out was kind of all the stuff that was happening at work. So that they had a lot of interruptions that their schedule shifted around a lot they had all these different deadlines to meet and that's what was stressing them out it wasn't the people it was kind of the administrative side of things and so again now we know libraries could take specific steps to solve that. And then our third group of people just my heart broke a little here but this is the people who were just stressed out about everything everything is upsetting that people are upsetting the administrative stuff is upsetting them the technologies it's just everything is hard for these folks and knowing that you have people in your organization who had this level of stress might lead you to more to larger steps that you could take to try and help them out so you know whether you refer them to an EAP or something else now you know. So now I'm not anticipating that you're going to necessarily look within your library to see what you guys are stressed out about although it's certainly a good study and I advocate it for everyone I have other public library studies that I've done that show different kinds of stressors and I'd be happy to talk with you later about that. But what I want to do now is now you sort of see how things are grouped in the end. So we go through a Q study come up with these nice little groupings. So now I want to kind of walk through the process of how do we set up a Q study. What what happens in Q? Because again if I ask sort of for a show of hands and everybody sitting at your desk or in your living room if everybody raises their hand who's heard of Q methodology no no yeah I see a distinct lack of hands up in the air right now. This is not surprising because I have this all the time because I talk about Q methodology a lot when I go places I talk about it with my students and and pretty much it's it's an unfamiliar process but I do think it's something it's easy it's fun we can do this as people who are small public librarians. So why would you and when your board asks you you have all of these things to do you are you have to do you know you have to do your programming you have to do reference you have to check books out you have to bring new stuff in you have to keep the doors open why would be trying to add more on to your plate well it's because it's always important for us to try and figure out what people need and what people want and it will be super if what our communities needed and wanted stayed the same and it never changed and from day to day and year to year it was always the same we would know how to help them then and that would be great I don't know if you're in a community like that but I I've never been so let's just assume that probably you're not either and that understanding your patrons and understanding your community which includes people who don't come to your library is going to be important in trying to make sure that you stay relevant to their lives and that you stay relevant and important in your role as public librarian so the time that you take to set aside for evaluation it's it should pay off for you so first of all you want to figure out what your evaluation need is so after we walk through this process I'm going to show you a study that I'm that I have finished looking at public libraries across the state of Illinois and then talk a little bit about a public study that I'm starting that might be relevant to you but in my study that I was at in Illinois what we wanted to know was what what do people want what do people in the community want from their public libraries so it might be things that they don't know we have it might be things that they definitely know we have but they're just not there maybe they're using them and they love them or they are we they know we have them but they don't care so that's your evaluation need and yours could be different and this could literally be anything so it could be looking at your stress your staff to see how stressed they are you can be looking at you know community needs you could be looking at specific groups of people so let's say you're interested in recruiting more seniors into your library so that would be your evaluation need or you want to bring in more five-year-olds to your library because they're always fun and so bring in these five-year-olds would be would be your evaluation need it can be anything anything relevant to you so then the next step that I have on here is to develop a set of ideas that are relevant to your topic so with a Q method you print out a little set of cards and each card has an idea so you have one idea on each card and then people will sort them in order from their most to least but all you have to do first is come up with your ideas this can be kind of tricky so you and your staff your community you know trusted patrons a board member more board members people that would have an interest in your topic ask them what kinds of things they think you might want to put in you want to try and hold it it can go to about 60 and still be valid but think for yourself if somebody handed you a set of 60 different cards and told you to sort them in order from one to 60 and you like most to think you like least it's tough so I try to hold it down to like 25 or 30 usually and you can go fewer than that if you'd like to so just come up with your ideas that are relevant and good and then find some people so now in my study in Illinois my people that we were recruiting was literally anyone I was looking just at people who were 18 and over but that was essentially my only criteria they didn't have to be library users they didn't have to love the library nothing they just had to be in the community and over the age of 18 but now again think about when I mentioned the study on senior citizens if you want to look at the services that you're offering for seniors then obviously you've defined yourself into a senior citizen category and so however you and your library want to define senior citizens is is is good so figure out who you want and then bring some people in it's not really difficult to do you could take this out on the road if you want to I've done this in a few diners I've done this in people's offices it's very simple you just have to have a little space to sort some cards and then your final step in getting ready is just to print out your cards and then worksheets I'm going to show you what a worksheet looks like in the next slide the cards are so easy because I don't have a lot of big technical skills either all you do is go to your go to the store and the business cards that you can get the print yourself that's what I use so print those out and on the front side each card has an idea and on the back side put a number so number one to 25 on your worksheet then you're going to give a place for people to record their answers but you also want to collect a few demographic questions now this is where when I'm talking about this in class my students start to freeze up a little bit and say demographics I don't know that's starting to sound like a hard word it's not no worries here all it is and you kind of want to have an idea of who you're talking to particularly if like my Illinois study that was anybody anybody over the age of 18 but I wanted to know kind of what their age ranges were so how many people are coming in who are you know 40 to 50 and then 51 to 60 how many people are coming in who regularly use the library you can ask them you know when was the last time you were in the library last week last month in the last year in the last five years do you have a library card if you have a gender identification some things that you're going to want to look at will you want to know about people who are interested in different kinds of languages or different kinds of services in your library that might be relevant to people who speak different languages at home so that would be good then to ask so what language do you speak at home all you want to do when you're thinking about the graphics is just figure out who it is that you're who it is that's answering your questions you don't have to collect their name that's not relevant it's not useful so it's not it's not personal it's not personally identifiable information just stuff that'll help you to identify who you have so you can make your results better for everybody so this is sorry a little bit blurred now this is kind of the ideal of what a Q sort process looks like so you could make something like this and print this out and people could lay their cards down in all these different little areas now I will tell you I don't know if this makes me a bad Q study researcher but I have never actually used one of these because it looks kind of it looks to me a little bit complicated it requires a little bit more explanation so I just make I just print out a word sheet and just have the numbers one through 25 printed out on there and then I just tell people to sort them and just lay them in a big line on their table or on the desk in front of us and then they flip each card over and I have a number on the back of the card so let's say whatever idea number nine was that that's what they think is absolutely the most important thing to have in the library so in the number one spot on the worksheet they write their answer is number nine I don't think it matters so much how you do it just as long as you make sure that they're that the answers are getting recorded in the order from stuff we like most to stuff we like least so this is how you actually do it all right now we've prepped we've looked at worksheet development so this is how you actually do a Q study this is your data collection so you have your person who comes in you might have a few people at the same time it's fine it either way works you give each person who comes in a set of cards so they have a whole set of your cards one through 25 and each card again has an idea on the front a number on the back and they get a set and they get a worksheet so you just you explain to them a little bit I'm looking for I'm looking I'm interested in fighting out you know what programs are most relevant to five year olds so could you or to parents of five year olds that might be easier uh do you go through and rank these for the thing that you like most to the thing that you like least now this is where your summary assurance comes in because I've had people kind of freak out a little bit here and they really they're so concerned about making it right making sure that uh it's exactly right that it's really they really want to make sure that it's good it's okay all they need to do is just sort so they can start off by maybe putting things into three piles so they have a pile of ideas that they know yeah definitely these these these are awesome I need these and they have a pile of uh no this is just not of any interest to me and they have a pile of I don't know maybe and then within those piles they can start to sort things out I always try to tell people too that what they would put down as card number one card number two yeah that's probably not wildly different and that's okay it doesn't have to be so don't worry too much about specific placement those numbers will be very those what you sort there what you have interest in very very most will be very different than a card that you would sort like into the tenth spot and it's probably very very different definitely very very different than a card that you would sort into like spot number 20 so don't worry so much about just strict perfection within the you know within your number of cards but get it close get in get in the ballpark and that's that's going to be fine now they don't have to absolutely love everything that you're giving to them maybe you want to find out what sort of programming would be good in your library and so you have you've given people 15 different potential programs that you could offer to see what they what they're interested in and somebody comes to you and says these are all just yucky I don't like any of these but well what do least eight could be number one and what do you most hate then would be number 15 or and this is a little more typical people say I love all of these I would love to have all of these come in well now this is where a cue method is I think really superior to those like art scales on a survey they can't say everything is exactly the same so maybe they discover that the technology petting zoo is pretty close to the baby goat petting zoo program that you want to bring in and you know now that they're thinking about it yeah maybe the square dancing program is down at the bottom it's still good they still love to do it square dancing in the library would be awesome but it's not it's not as good for them as the baby goat petting zoo and the technology petting zoo so I've had a few people who just really take a while it's okay just just kind of I always say in sort of a metaphorical way a pat pat you're fine everybody's good just keep going so you have them sort their cards in the order until they're happy with it and they say yes I'm happy this this is it and then they just flip the cards over and there's an each each idea has been given a number they put those numbers in order onto their worksheet and it's pretty simple so sometimes people they'll finish it all up on the hand and then they'll then they're excited well now what happens now what do you do or tell me what you were really trying to get at I always try to be sure people this there there was nothing excitingly hidden here it really was just the idea of it really was just that I wanted to know what sort of programs you're interested in or I want to know what sort of stress you're having that's all so you can if people are interested you can offer to you know make up a report that you could share them with your community include in your newsletter put up on your website something like that just so people understand where you where you went with the results that they gave to you all right now we have a huge pile of data in our hands and by huge pile of data I mean you probably have 30 worksheets in your hands 30 people came in hooray success so because this is fancy and statistical and all you go to the fun computer program now the one that I have been using is called pq method and I'm going to give you a site at the end for where this is found but I can just tell you now the website is called q method dot org no spaces or dashes or anything just the letter q method dot org so they have software on there that they have built it's a little clunky and by a little clunky I mean there might be tears but it it works out eventually and I'll show you at the end again I'm going to show you materials that you can use to set up your own q studies and I'll walk you through it so this is the one I've been using because it's free and because I'm although I've occasionally had a few tears over I'm familiar with it and I get it it works so it's fine there are other new programs though that are out as q method becomes a bigger methodology more people are interested in it so they're building other software that'll do this so q has actually been around for quite a while it's been around since the early 1900s William Stevenson a professor at University of Chicago in psychology was the one who developed this and it's so it's been there for a while but really one of the things that's always held the held it back or held it back for many years was it's an amazing amount of work to put together and so we had to really wait to get popular until computers could start doing all of this for us so there we're getting better too people are building better and better programs but when I say okay you type in all your data there and then magic happens I am technically a researcher and scholar and all those good things but I don't really understand how all of the statistics works it is essentially a factor analysis comparing the position of every single answer that every single person gives to the positioning of every other answer that every single other person gave I shorthand that is it's magic so but it works out it just they give you like 50 sheets of data 50 pages of data at the end and it's very cool it's very exciting and you look at it like I have stuff I really have something here again it's something that you can really show to your funders and you show your board and you say look see how see how worth it this was this is data we can rely on this is good data this is this was worth the time and the occasional tier it's good so in in all of these 50 pages of data you'll start you'll see groupings of people and it's these groupings that are kind of the the interesting part so they'll tell you well people who as we looked at with the stress study first of all here everybody who chose these five things as this was the most important thing to them this is this is the most this is the big thing this is what definitely affects their life that they're in a group and you you'll also find the people in that group the things that they didn't like the things that were not interesting to them that were not important to them of all of that we'll go into defining a group so when you finish this you might say oh well these are probably things that I knew about my patrons I don't anticipate most of you when you do Q studies will have enormous surprises because you know your patrons I mean you know the people who come in and especially or even when you're looking at studies that are that you're looking at outside of your patrons you know you're looking at people in the community who don't use the library I mean you still probably know them I mean I have spent most of my lives in small communities and even if we're not on first name basis I kind of have a gist of other people so you're not going to find tremendously surprising things necessarily although you might find some some groupings that surprise you or some groupings that you hadn't necessarily thought of in this way so it'll help you to understand what it is that people want from you what it is that people like what it is that is making people happy in their different ways that they're relating to your library so I got started in Q method I had done a couple of small studies but I did this large study in Illinois and if anybody is out there from an Illinois public library and they have stopped off in your library a few years ago and it was this was a really interesting and for me very fun project so the former Lewis and Clark library system in Illinois which sadly is is no more but they the director there and then a couple of their staff were really interested in trying to figure out what what do we want what we're thinking about the future we're planning for the future we have things kind of ready to go but what what do our people what do our there are the people that our library serve what do they actually want we don't want to just guess because that we can make mistakes and we could really you know we can guess and decide everyone wants Kindles and you're an iPad community everyone uses apples no one will touch your Kindle I mean you've just wasted a whole lot of money and a whole lot of time so that's what we wanted to avoid we also wanted to give people as libraries we're starting to think about strategic plans and several of their libraries in this system and across the state too I think but it specifically in the system we're thinking about their their strategic plans and so we wanted they wanted as a system to be able to provide some guidance to the libraries as you're planning for your for your future as you're writing your strategic plan for the next you know three years five years what what should we be what should you be putting in what should you be sort of aiming yourself toward even knowing you're not there this year you're not there next year but five years down the road where do we want to be so we wanted to ask people it seems so simple now doesn't hit in retrospect but it actually took a while to get to that so I traveled around the state and stopped in the some libraries and libraries helps me find people in their community and it was just for me it was a fantastic experience and we found three groupings of library users now again I doubt any of these are going to be amazingly shocking to you but it was still it was useful to have this kind of information it was useful to be able to sort of boil it all down to just these three groups that we were really looking at so these were libraries that were small rural libraries but also some of the larger we didn't go to Chicago public but we did go to some of the large libraries outside of Chicago so it was a real cross-section and that I think I mean that gave us the answers that were good kind of an above view of Illinois but I'm going to talk later about my study coming up where I'm trying to make this a little finer so completely unsurprisingly this was the first group that came up and it wasn't necessarily the most populated the largest group but it was the first one that popped up in the data and certainly no one no one was stunned by this people are just happy they just like the library they come in they have books they have magazines some of them say they like the coffee that's fun and that's it they're happy they're they're not really interested in more although several and these library people library users tended to skew toward the older age ranges and they said though and several of them were saying to me I know things like email and Facebook and all that are out there that was that was something that they could choose I'm not interested in it but I know my neighbors are I know my grandkids are so we wanted them to just focus on them specifically what are you interested in so it was interesting I think several people in this group said I know it's not for me but thinking about it you might include it so then our next group was information innovation oh and a question that I have to get is where do these names come from we thought of these names so you get to name your group whatever you think is going to be descriptive and if you want to name it a fun name go ahead and do that but that it does not come up in your statistic data that that comes from you so we called the second group the information innovation group so these were people who wanted new things they liked they like the books they like the computers they like the programs that were there but what else could we do what what was new what was exciting so we had several different programs that were in this list of choices that people could use and these people tended to go for all of those they tended to go for everything that that was technology so this group one of the things that they were interested in was potentially seeing podcasts recorded in the library that would be fun for them you guys of course are already on board here because you've got the webinar and I know this day library of Nebraska has been very popular very innovative in doing a lot of this kind of online training other places have so you probably are already familiar with idea of this kind of innovation but patrons are saying they want that too so this might be something that you want then to bring it back to your library they also wanted to things that they were interested in is not just the technology but being able to focus it in on themselves and being able to kind of bring things the way they wanted it so less group instruction and more individual more instruction that they could do on their own outside of the library it was they were they liked stuff that we did and they wanted to make it theirs so this third group we were a little surprised to see this although now again this has been a few years since the study was done and I'm less surprised now that this is up but this was one of the first studies that I had seen showing that people come to the libraries and they're not there for the books and they're not there for the computers but they are there just for the stuff so they're there for the cultural programming they're there for art lessons they're there to work on we didn't have maker spaces and 3d printers when this study was done several years ago but increasingly now that's something that you might extrapolate from this so they're there to do fun things this doesn't mean wildly expensive things I would be really excited if I could get a 3d printer to put in my office I would love that but I don't have the funds for that a lot of small libraries don't have the funds for things like that right now although you guys might be considering doing more expensive things sort of as a as as library systems or joining with other libraries but people who are interested in the service library programming they were also actually interested in the library like providing classes excuse me classes for them and things a couple of people this wasn't part of our study but a couple of people mentioned that they liked to come to the library and net and that they would have liked it if the library had had like a little knitting group I mean that's something that would be easy and I know I've seen libraries who do that so something like that might be what you want to bring into your library and to make sure that you are you're kind of reaching out to the people who are there for that idea of the library is the third space your first base is your home we spend a lot of time your second space is your work we spend too much time and then your third space is where you're going for fun and I don't know if you've read the book or seen the book called bowling alone I do not remember the author off the top of my head but bowling alone you guys are librarians you can find it and he talked about this several years ago about the idea that you know people used to go down and hang out at the bar on the corner or people used to join bowling leagues and there's less of that now because we have different ways to communicate in different ways to be but people still want that personal connection and a library can be a place to provide that kind of personal connection so where is all of this going then excuse me so I'm interested now in taking that study and the the knowledge that I got from that and trying to focus it a little bit more so what I'd like to be doing and I'm I'm beginning the process of this now so if you're alive that I may have already contacted looking for help and support on this thank you and if you're not I may still get to you I'm just just beginning this right now but what I want to do is look at similar kinds of ideas to what was in this study but look specifically at the large urban libraries what do people want from them and then very specifically step away from that and look at small libraries look at rural libraries and the day I think these two populations are going to have very different patron needs but I do actually anticipate overall people pretty much want the same things from libraries so I want to see what the specific differences are what kind of differences in abilities to provide things what kind of differences in what our patrons want what they will be but I am interested too in just what makes us we're all public libraries and what makes this all public libraries so it's building on this study but trying to expand it so I'm starting the recruiting process now for libraries in each one of these categories and if you're interested in participating this could be a way for you to sort of start off with a Q study because I'll be doing the Q study and then you could just you'll see how it how it's done you could sort of adapt it for yourself and do other Q studies in your library you'll have it forever it's always for you and if you're not interested obviously that's fine too right now I'm just again at the beginning kind of stages of thinking about things and putting ideas together so I've been talking to librarians in both large libraries and then in small libraries and trying to get a sense of what are the things that they do that they think are most important so this slide right here is about 45 items I this isn't this isn't the end this is just I'm probably going to add some more to this and then start trying to refine this down a little bit and trying to make sure that I'm not asking people so many things that it starts to be confusing for them or it starts to it starts to be lack a lot of meaning so the groups that we get are sort of mushy I don't want that I wanted to be good I want this to be something useful so what I did with the study in Illinois is each committee that we visited I wrote a final report we provided the report on that community and then with the information also in compared to the rest of the state and that would that report we gave to the library directors and we also sent copies to the mayors of each community so that the mayor again kind of had that sense of libraries important libraries are vibrant things are happening in libraries and that's always such such an important thing and I think small libraries have that easier and harder in some ways both than than the larger libraries easier because you probably know your mayor you probably are you're acquainted you've been around each other it's easy to bump into each other that kind of access can be very very useful very valuable harder in that you know your mayor you guys have easy access to each other and I know I've been in situations and helped work with librarians and other in situations where that was not a good thing where maybe you know the it was a very strange relationship and that makes it harder the way around each other if you had a little more distance it might be better but regardless I'm very interested always in the idea of advocacy so I always want to do these studies and find out this information for librarians not just because it's fun and not just because it's interesting and not just because we might change a couple of things that we do but really because I want us to be reaching out and I want us to be you know talking to other people everywhere I travel around the country a lot and I visit a lot of libraries and I very truthfully I'm stunned constantly stunned by how great libraries are even I mean the very smallest libraries I've been to the very smallest communities where it's one person who volunteers three hours a day three days a week and that's the library still they're doing just really neat amazing things and I want to make sure that we're telling other people how neat amazing and wonderful we are so using a Q method is a way to not only have fantastic data that you could take out and you could share and give to other people but also to help just you sort of connect with the people in your community and say oh yeah did you remember we do this we do this we do this we are just this awesome you should come see us so this is obviously just sort of a quick overview of some work that I've done with Q potential work that you might want to do with Q and a quick overview is not not necessarily enough here to kind of get you started and help you to feel comfortable so the blurry book over here on the right I'm pointing at the green one this it says Q methodology and I actually have a copy of the book right here in my hand too this is written by Bruce McKeon and excuse me Dan Thomas and so it's part of a series called quantitative applications in the social sciences there this is book number 66 there are a whole bunch of these little green books and they're nice they're very useful they're from sage and they're they're good I find this a little complicated and until now though it's really been until recently it's been the book though that everybody used so last year this book on the left doing Q methodological resource research rather came out and so I'm actually still waiting for my copy to be delivered Amazon had a big run on them but this just looks fantastic and so I've looked through it and it looks very good very useful and I think it'll help to sort of break the process down a little bit more so that you do feel comfortable you do feel like even if you don't have a really intense statistical background even if you don't have a statistical background I really have almost no math skills don't don't tell everybody else I'll be embarrassed but I my math is terrible and I can do Q method it's it's something that's very doable and so it's something I think that can really be very useful to us so this is the website that I mentioned earlier called qmethod.org so this is where the Q community hangs out this is where everybody gets together people in a lot of disciplines come there they all their papers are put up there different software that people are building to help interpret your Q data are there there's a good listserv where people are talking about things sometimes they're talking about stuff that's really complicated and I don't understand it but often though they're asking questions and they're bringing up ideas of things that that were really useful to me so these are the places that I would start for you as you're thinking about ways that you could evaluate ways that you can look at your community in ways that you can bring in these new ideas to to your library and definitely what those should be me not not to push myself on you but I really enjoy working with the libraries to help set these kinds of things up so I said at the beginning of this discussion I was a public library director I it was my first job out of library school and when I talk about this I often say to my students I had no idea what I was doing I really I was so lost and I was so confused and I wanted to be better and I wanted to do better and I was really fortunate that I was in a good place that I got a lot of training that and that the people who were around me in my system in my state people that I knew from other places were supportive and were helpful and that that really helped to get me through so when I entered the academic side of the profession though I did this with kind of the thinking that I'm here to be the person who does the academic stuff who does the researchy stuff in public libraries specifically this is my area this is what I spent all my time talking about so that people who are doing the hard work of public libraries they don't have time but I do so we can partner together and we can work together so it's kind of a long way of saying I'm here this is my email address but you can always find me at Simmons College and again my slides and everything will be at the on this conference and I'll be really happy to talk with you whether you're hearing this live or whether you're hearing this tape later if you want to set up a Q project or any sort of project really but I'm specifically interested in Q today I'm really happy to talk with you and help work with you okay so that is all that I had to say and I wanted to leave a few minutes for questions all right thanks very this time if you want to go ahead and start trying to type in yep we will happily take questions for Mary view the q&a we already have got some queued up but please feel free to submit more we'll get to as many as we can and we have been recording this and we'll be posting everything post Laura so we have some questions from the audience okay we have one is there a difference between asking people to sort cards and just asking them to rank a list huh um I'm going to loosely say no and thinking that I understand exactly what you're saying the idea is just that they're going to rank an idea so they're sorting sorting ranking the sorting goes number one is my very best most favorite number two is slightly less most favorite than number one yeah um so in that sense same thing um another question have you done a study looking at the difference in perception of library needs between users non-users and uh staff more friends that was actually something that and that was beyond kind of the scope of what we're talking about today it was something that we did try to break out of this study so I did also then um not do a queue but I surveyed all the library staff across Illinois and then I also surveyed directors across the country to sort of compare from what the patrons said they wanted to what the library staff said that they wanted or that they and that they felt comfortable doing now and then what library directors across the country thought libraries kind of should be doing in general um they weren't the answers there weren't wildly different uh I think the patrons wanted more kind of hands on thing and the library people seem to be a little bit more interested in providing better materials but again this is a study that was a few five or six years old now so I think it may be different by now I think we may all be thinking more along the lines of service okay um another question can you include blank cards for the patron or user to fill out to add to the stack no that's a question and I should have thought to say that no you can't because you need to sort what you have there so what I do and I always do this and I did in this study is on their worksheet I say what else do you like so for example one thing that none of us thought of and I I can't imagine what we were doing but when we put our cards together no one thought about including homeschool services and so several homeschool parents were part of our study and I had one woman who wrote the she covered the entire front of the worksheet the back of the sheet and I gave her two more pieces of paper and she had so many ideas to share so that you bring in other ideas but in just your sort you need to identify and define every card okay okay we have several questions and I'm going to try to kind of put them all together in one the essence of it seems to be how do you find the people out in the community or the people who don't come into the library to query them how do you get people to participate sure oh and this is always the challenging thing so this is being that I will say in my study I don't think we did as well as I had planned it to happen what I am planning now now that I'm more experienced in Q and know more about what I'm doing is actually trying to contact community organizations so try to contact like the lions contact a Spanish center that you might have in your community different organizations I know people will be and ask them if I could come there and do some of these studies with their people who may not be library or I'm sorry may not be library users other things that I have seen people do and I think this would actually be great and this thing again be something that would be simpler in a smaller community than in a large urban area where people don't know you is try to set up a desk the hardware store on a Saturday and see if you know as people are coming out of the hardware store could you take a few minutes we'll give you a library pencil if you fill out a Q study for us it doesn't take very long to do this it really even sorting a bunch of cards only takes about 10 minutes so going to a hardware store going to a grocery grocery store someplace that's kind of outside your usual route and it's a little difficult it's a little intimidating didn't go ask people but most people are probably interested okay um we have a question have you tried an online version of this I have and again if you go to the method org they have online software that you can use I again didn't just because I always try to keep everything as simple as it possibly as I probably can so in fact the academic study that I showed you I did parallel studies and I did one online for academic librarians and then I did one traveled around to different academic libraries and actually visited them in person and the answers were just the same the the same kind of groupings came up in both ways so I've done it and I it's it's fine it works great I kind of like the hand-holding aspect I kind of like being able to sit there with people because while they're sorting you're chatting and you're talking about things and they may just come up with other ideas that they just want to share they may say wow yeah I never thought of this this is so cool so I don't think there's a bad way to go but just have a reason for why you're going online or in person okay and final question please um what is the name of that software that analyzes the information um right the one that I use is called the software that I've been using is called pq method letter p letter q method all one word and it's on the q method website it is clunky it is a little difficult to use and I think also on the web on the q method website there are other software programs that you can use that I think will probably be easier I've just kind of stuck with this because it's the one that I started with and it's the one that I know but you may want to start with another one and so they'll be available on the q website what kind of cost is involved most of them are free the one that I'm using the pq method is completely free which is certainly an excellent price for a poor academic but the other ones I I didn't buy this but a friend of mine bought a bought once a piece of software and I think it was like $25 these are things that people are just kind of putting together themselves so they're not there there is no large company that's making q method software and charging you Microsoft level prices okay all right well thank you very much right that is our time for this session of big talk from small libraries we have been recording and we will be posting all the recordings and slides post conference starting next week and Mary's email address there is for you on the screen if you have any additional questions unfortunately due to time we can't get to everybody's questions Mary thank you once again for that we really appreciate it we gave us a lot to think about