 Yes. Hello. Good morning from Hiddison University. I'm delighted that we have such a broad audience again this morning. This is our fourth collaborative event and today we'll focus on understanding the user experience. We have four presentations. I think I really just wanted to echo about comments there and just for terms of context. This is part of the digital shift forum experience. As Ableton said, it's our fourth collaborative event. We're really excited to continue to be working and collaborating with our German colleagues and really having that opportunity to share and look at the ways in which libraries have continued to innovate and develop pioneering services in response to changing user needs. Without further ado, with any more from me, I'm delighted to introduce our first speaker, who is Anthony Groves from the University of Sussex Library. Anthony is learning and teaching librarian at Sussex. I'm going to hand over to Anthony to introduce himself and his presentation. Take it away, Anthony. Thank you, William. I'll start sharing my screen now and ask the obligatory question whether everyone can see it. Let me just check. Brilliant. Can everyone see the title, Users and Usage, Building and Evidence Based for Good Design? Perfect. Thank you. Yes, my name is Anthony and I am one of the librarians at the University of Sussex Library. I'm going to introduce myself in a little bit more detail as I go through the presentation. So this is what I want to talk about today or as we're at RLUK in the language of research librarians performing qualitative and quantitative research on our library services to further improve those services for the people using them. So this picture that I've got in the background is when I took a few summers ago outside the library and it's a really nice reminder whenever I go onto campus that the desire lines that our users take. So whatever structures we build, they will tend to find the quickest way to find the information that we need and the quickest way to navigate them. I mean, more often than not, when we're thinking about our kind of digital presence and our web services, this is going to be a search box. I think it has really kind of important implications for how we structure information and how we think about our users moving through our digital environments. But that's probably a talk for another time. What I'd really like to focus on today are some of the approaches, the principles, the frameworks, the methods and the tools that we've used to try and find out more about our users and what they would like from our services. So as I said, my name is Anthony and I am one of the learning and teaching librarians at the University of Sussex. What this basically means is among other things I'm responsible for teaching our students about our services and our resources, particularly undergraduates and talk post graduates. I'm also kind of lead on the development of our website. So making those services easily discoverable and understandable. And I also look after the team that answer our online chat service. So any questions that users will have about these services. So I'm really interested in that front to back aspect of service design, whether that's how we talk to students about our services or whether that's questions we're answering and how they get the most out of them. And this ties in really closely with UX and I also sit on the library UX group. So a way to think about how these two areas of work function together UX and service design. This is a diagram from the Norman Nielsen group. And they're definitely worth kind of checking out the UX resources they have there. So when we talk about UX research, what we're really thinking about are those user centric actions. So things that are focused on the users. So if this was the chat service that I oversee, when we're doing user research around this, we're looking at things that how easily students might find the chat box. So what web pages do we help them on? How easy the chat box is to use. Is it easy to kind of type in your question, do you get a response quickly? And what sort of responses do you get? Are you getting kind of accurate, quick responses from library staff who are providing that service? However, from the service design perspective, we take a step back and look a little bit more holistically at it. So we're going to be looking at some of what are known as the front stage and backstage action and support processes. So those might be things like how we wrote a staff to make sure that that service is offered effectively between 9 and 5pm. Maybe how those staff are trained, what pages we've added the chat box to, and even what chat service we're using. One might be kind of better to use than the other. So we're starting to take this more kind of holistic approach to looking at service design and UX. So what we actually have here, this representation is something that's known as a service blueprint. And this is an activity we've just started and it's something we're going to try and do over the summer, a little bit of UX research. And we're going to be working with students and members of the library to try and blueprint some of our key services. And the way that we're going to do this is we're going to work with students and we're going to ask them to create some user journeys. So some of their key user journeys, and this will be how they navigate through a particular service. So our chat box, for example, that might not be a service in its own right. What it might be is a touch point on a larger customer journey. So maybe what they're actually trying to do is find a book in the library. And the touch points for that journey might be that they use our library catalogue, they're able to find that book. They come into the building and they use our big touchscreen kiosk, which has got our floor plans on. That might be another touch point, but maybe they're not able to find what they need on that map. So they then use our chat service to ask the support from staff. So it gives you a bigger picture of that whole journey. And then for the second part of the blueprinting, what we're going to do is we're going to ask staff, our annual library staff conference, to start mapping these front stage actions, backstage actions and support processes as they relate to the different touch points. So what do we need to provide that online chat effectively? What might we need for that kiosk with the digital floor plan to work better? So that's one of the activities we're going to be undertaking. And the students we're going to be working with are student connectors. And this is a kind of project that's running at the university. It's really useful to us because it means that we're able to work with students much more closely. I've got a short video which will explain it now much better than I'm able to. So I'll cross my fingers and hope that this works, the anticipation. Okay, can I bring you just to this here just there? Right. And am I looking at you? I'm going for it. Have you ever thought things at the university could be better and wanted to make a change? We did. That's why we became connectors. The connector program is a community of students and staff. Where we work together in equal partnership. And everyone's perspectives are respected and valued. Hearing what the students actually need and want from us. Means we can develop innovative and meaningful ideas together. Co-creating projects which improve the university experience for everyone, including you. While developing real-life skills that employers are looking for, like problem solving, leadership, communication and project management skills. And getting paid to be part of it. The University of Sussex connector program. How students and staff make positive change together. So we have this really great route already where we can reach out to groups of students to get them to help with some of this work that we're doing. And another one of the projects that we're going to be doing with student connectors over the summer is redesigning our induction. So our kind of annual welcome week and the lead up to that and the period we have after. And to do that what we're going to be using is using the design council's double diamond framework for innovation. And this is just a really helpful way to conceptualise some of this work and think about how it fits together. You have these two stages of divergent and convergent thinking that discover stage. And this is particularly where some of these UX research methods are really going to come in and be helpful. And this is where we're going to ask our student connectors to talk to their peers, talk to librarians about what they feel should be included in an induction, talk to their tutors about what they think it would be helpful for them to know to start off with. And then we'll use the defined stage. So we'll look to think about what we can actually fit in an induction. Then we'll start developing those materials. So the channels, the videos, podcasts, webpages that we might use. And this area that develop and deliver is another really important phase where some of these UX principles are going to come in. So as you're rapidly prototyping some of these induction material, assessing them, testing them to make sure that they're working, that people looking at them are getting the information that they need. What you'll often find with design agencies is that you will have specialists doing different parts of this. So you might have content designers. You might have interaction designers. You might have UX researchers. But as librarians, I think we're all used to wearing lots of different hats. And I think there really is an opportunity here for staff development as well. And what you'll also see on the framework is we've got design principles and methods as well. So what we'll look at next are a couple of principles and methods that we've been using in the library. So you might be surprised to hear that the government design principles are some of the ones that we largely follow. And I'm pleased that we're on mute, so I can't hear any booing at this stage. And I'll be clear that I am only advocating for their design principles. But these were put together by the former head of the government digital services, Lou Down, who's also written this brilliant book, Good Services, that I would highly recommend. And we'll be speaking at the UX London conference next month. But the design principles are a 10 kind of key government design principles, so three that we try and kind of foreground in our work are starting with user needs, designing with data, iterating and iterating again. So it's thinking about this UX research that we're doing, that the qualitative and quantitative data that we can get to kind of inform our services, and then kind of continue doing so that continual improvement. So what we'll do now is finally I'll finish off by looking up one of the methods. I looked at some of the frameworks and the principles that we used, but I wanted to share one that from my experience is a little less usual in our sector at the moment. We've used it several times in the library, but it's something known as a card sort. And it's a really useful method, particularly as we're kind of shifting over into the digital environment and the more that we're creating online, the more that we're making available online. So the idea with a card sort is it helps you to structure information if you're creating a website. It helps you to build the architecture of the website around your user's needs, around how they expect things to be put together, how they expect web pages to be structured. And the basic principle is you would have your web pages as these cards on the side, individual web pages. So it might be you've got a page that's find a book, place an interlibrary loan, check your library account, whatever it might be. And then what the user would do that you're running this bit of research with would group these together into sections. So they would pull together the individual pages into sections that they thought made sense. If it was an open card sort, you would then also ask them to give that section a name. If it was a closed card sort, you would move it into existing sections. So if you're just adding a new kind of page to your website, you might do a closed card sort where you have the kind of six sections that are already on your website, and you ask your users where would you expect to find this page if we were to add it. What's really great about the card sorts is you get both qualitative and quantitative data. So if you do these in person, and by that I mean kind of online, just live, you can ask the participant to think aloud and talk about the decisions that they're making. And you get it becomes much richer the information that you're able to find out. So it might be that actually they're struggling to decide which section to put something in. They might be struggling between two sections. So you can make a note of that. It might be that there's a page that they thought you'd have that you don't. They were really expecting to see a page on study skills or referencing, and they're really surprised that that isn't there. So you can also get this really kind of rich qualitative data from doing card sorts. And as I say, it's something with the numerous times now. And I've shown to other colleagues at the institution, and I know other departments are using this as well, and I'd really advocate for this approach. This particular tool optimal sort from optimal workshop. There's a free version as well, which is why I wanted to include this. And the link is at the bottom there. So I want to finish off just again with the kind of picture of desire lines from the star. And to make it easier for you to find the information that you need. What I'm going to do is copy these links into the chat box as well. So anything that I've spoken about today, you can easily follow up. You don't need to worry about going back through the whole presentation. You can just get to the links there. So I hope that was useful. Some of the approaches, the principles, the frameworks and methods that we've been using at Sussex and some of the projects that we've got going on over the summer with our student connectors as well. Fantastic. Thank you very much. That's incredibly inspiring and really great to see all that exciting work which is going on at Sussex. So thank you very much, particularly, yeah, as it's coming into the chat there. It's like the student network program and the links. So just moving on, so we'll come back so people can have the opportunity and you're putting things into the chat for colleagues to kind of raise some questions and some chat as we sort of move forward that we can then pick up. But I want to move on to Guy. So I'm delighted to introduce Guy Baxter from University of Reading for the opportunity to do some great collaboration work with Guy. And I'm going to hand over to Guy now. I'm afraid my camera is taking a while to start. I probably can't see me at the moment. There you are. There you go. Well, hopefully we'll have no problems with me sharing my screen and starting my presentation. Fingers crossed for that. Thank you, William. It was really interesting and really great to see what's going on at Sussex as well. So I'm just going to share my slides and start this. Okay, hoping that this is working now and that we can begin. So good morning, everybody. Colleagues, I'm Guy Baxter. I'm head of archive services at the University of Reading where we have the Museum of English Rural Life and also our special collections service. Today I'm going to be talking about our approach to audiences. I'm not anything like a UX design expert. I'm completely an amateur at these things. And as you'll see, hopefully we're trying to find a way through some quite complex issues in a very practical way. Maslow. Maslow's hierarchy of needs, yes. I'm sure we've all seen it. I'm sure we've all been thinking this is very boring and old. And some of you are probably surprised because you thought our museum is famous just for being quite amusing on Twitter with that large sheep. Well, I can tell you now we're not just about that sheep. It's all very complex. We've got all kinds of things going on. I'll explain some of those. If you don't know about the sheep, this was something on our Twitter account that went viral, got a huge number of likes and made us quite famous or infamous, I'm not sure, in the social media world. But the Museum of English Rural Life is our largest and most high-profile museum within the University of Reading. We also, within our department, we look after collections of rare books. We look after archives across a large number of other subject areas. We look after artworks. We're involved in teaching and learning. We've got public engagement programs going on. So there's a lot of activity that's happening, a lot of partnerships that are happening, and therefore a lot of audiences that we're having to meet the needs of. So I've attempted to sort of characterize some of that by just, I suppose, really just sort of thinking broadly about the sorts of audiences and users that we might encounter in a typical week. A drop-in museum visitor who's visiting the hospital across the road, who just wants a break, come in, hasn't been before. An international visitor who's coming to the other end of perhaps the spectrum. An international visitor studying Samuel Beckett's letters, coming for postdoctoral research with an appointment, having spoken to our inquiry service. A member of a community group that's supporting younger people with dementia. They're attending perhaps a workshop, a gardening workshop in our museum garden. An architect or student who's joining a collections-based teaching session online. And, of course, a Canadian teenager who finds us funny on Twitter. And there are an awful lot of people in, across around the world who are finding us, but particularly North Americans who find us funny on Twitter. Quite a diverse group that we need to think about. So I've tried to look at the kind of, on the right of the screen, you have Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. And on the left, we have something we've used called the Engagement Funnel. So this is a very kind of linear approach, I suppose, to how you might meet audience needs. You start thinking about, well, when they arrive, and you're making an assumption that they arrive somewhere, when they arrive, they're going to need to have their basic needs met. So they want to be welcomed, but they also, they want to be able to find that there's a cafe and that there are toilets that they can use and that the museum is a temperature that's comfortable for them, et cetera, et cetera. They want to feel safe and secure, but they also then want to be inspired. They want to see things that help them gain knowledge to gain understanding, to be entertained. So we move up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. At the same time, we're looking through this Engagement Funnel. We've used this quite a lot with digital, but you're starting out with awareness and then interest into consideration, making a connection with people. So those approaches are very useful and remain useful as ways of thinking about how your audience, how your user approaches you and how you welcome and deal with your audience. Now, Anthony actually alluded to this, although I think he was with the blueprint that he was showing us, which was this user-centered and staff-centered models, the same system centered in some ways. And I think it's very true that across museums, libraries, and archives, there's a disconnect between access to collections information for researchers and access to digitized content for a wider audience. And that gives us a spectrum in terms of our online engagement about access that's very much focused on audiences and very much optimized for audiences and optimized for the system. So at one end, you've got the type of access, which is actually quite labour-intensive, quite creative writing blogs, social media, having conversations with people. At the other end, you may well have things where you are serving up a catalogue and you're hoping that people are able to find their way or designing it so that people can find their way around that and so that it can deliver lots of information very, very quickly and systematically. Trying to serve both audiences from that sort of single source of truth, our collections, our knowledge, our information. Like I say, it can be very labour-intensive and also be fraught with danger and the main danger is that you fail to serve the needs of either audience by trying too hard to do both. So we're aware of that and we're aware that trying to work across so many audiences often put us in a difficult situation in terms of spreading ourselves too thinly. So yes, we do get a little bit lost in the woods sometimes and the snow is building up and we don't know which path to take. So I'm going to just talk about two projects, one which is very museum-centred and one which is focused on a research collection from our university special collections and talk about how we've at least brought some user-centred thinking into those projects and how that's helped us. So the first one is based around a project which is broader than just this issue. A project that was about how users engage particularly with museum galleries but it had all sorts of other strands to it as well. It's called Building Connections. And as part of that project we commissioned some consultants, Lindsay Kark and Ken Boyd to research and give us the state of the art on good practice in museums for layered interpretation, particularly layered digital interpretation, digital online and digital onsite. And from their report they really encouraged us to look at user motivations in particular. So really back to those models, back to the funnel of engagement, back to Maslow, but really looking at those. But also thinking about the user's varying relationships with the museum, actually looking at a warm to cold type of relationship that the user may have with the museum. And one of the key moments of that was looking based on the work that Mitchell Whitelaw has done looking at generous browse interfaces. So Mitchell Whitelaw's work is about this idea that when you give someone a search box what you're actually doing is you're saying look at our collections, but you have to look at it as if you're looking through the letterbox on a front door. So actually saying, actually we need to make our interface particularly for certain audiences much more generous, much more immediate where they can start to see the content straight away. Bringing in more aspects of storytelling and a kind of blending of online and onsite digital interpretation. So out of that we then identified five different user types. So this was really in terms of thinking much more about the Museum of English Rural Life website. So we know we're successful on social media but when they come to the website it was perhaps not quite so fully thought through and in need of some greater focus on user experience. And those user types were people who were looking for information about an in-person visit so intending to visit in person. Then we had our new digital visitors and our browsers many of them coming from social media but also from other sources as well. Then we had to think about those people who've engaged with us digitally and have come back for more and ensuring that their experience is not just they're getting exactly the same as they had last time keeping people entertained and giving new information and giving new inspiration to them. And then we had these last two groups you could almost put together actually researchers and special groups such as people booking groups in or teachers looking to bring a teaching session to us. So more highly motivated in terms of this of having a very specific need that they're trying to have met and that they probably know that we are likely or able to meet that need. And we did some analysis. You can see some of the questions we were looking at down on the left-hand side of the screen. What are we doing for this visitor? What do they need? What makes it successful? What makes their visit successful from a staff point of view rather than just from their point of view and how does the journey end? So really starting to think about constructing those user journeys. And then we've started to turn that into some technical work particularly on one section of the museum website which is very much aimed at the general the general visitor. So the person who's audience type two on our previous slide. So the people who are coming primarily from social media who are probably an online only visitor and creating a simpler journey for those new digital users with layered content with some curated content and some semi curated content which is this generous interface generous visual index lots and lots of images that can come up. And then we also looked and I think this is really important and again it goes back to something that Anthony was saying about the front stage back stage and support services aspects of that type of model which is also looking at an easier workflow to encourage us to be able to incentivize us to add more content to the site which obviously is also very important and more calls to action for our users. So still a bit in development aspect of the website but we're pretty pleased with how that's been going. So the second project I want to talk about is to do with an archive of an experimental filmmaker Stephen Boskin a very large hybrid collection of digital and analog material including a large volume of digital files on 20 hard disk drives containing things like unfinished versions of films, email correspondence personal documents so a real challenge in terms of and it has been a real challenge and a big challenge actually for the team in terms of dealing with born digital content but also a challenge in terms of how best to make content discoverable and available from such a large and complex collection. So one of the things we did although this is part of a large arts and humanities research council research project led by Professor Rachel Garfield in our art department we also managed to secure some UK National Archives Testbed funding to look at a specific aspect which is how visualizations of large datasets can enable archivists to explore digital content testing our internal workflows but also looking very much at how best to help users navigate the relationship between say online access, reading room access the different ways in which you might approach a collection like that and we'd be looking at the use of emulation as well as extracting content from those disk drives and making it available on dedicated digital terminals so we've got a variety of solutions that we could apply so how did UX design how did a user centric approach help us with that? Well I'm not going to go into all the detail about this but you can see from this piece of analysis that we started and we found it very useful to start thinking about our users as having different motivations different needs so someone who's looking at broad research on Stephen Dwaskin's methodology may require very significant contextual information as opposed to someone who's perhaps only got a preliminary interest perhaps they're doing an essay on experimental film more generally and then they want to find out some information about Dwaskin and maybe and might need to look at something in the archive but possibly not and so I've just highlighted just one particular aspect which is about how the approach to the catalog because obviously the catalog in any archive library or museum service is a key tool that you're able to communicate information and this as it happened the way this analysis went was we could sort of use the catalog almost as a litmus test of whether we were able to meet the user needs so the user one the catalog is probably not enough we need something on top of that visualizations come into play very much emulations may well do as well data manipulation user two the catalog is probably about right that's probably the sensible approach is to direct people to the catalog and for user three the catalog may well be too much we want to give them information that's presented in a simple form we don't want to overwhelm them with the information so again very useful to take that user-centric approach and then start to think about how our services and our systems plug into that and then we've been doing some work with colleagues at the University of Glasgow Dr. Yoon Young Kim and Dr. Zoe Bartlett and actually also Dr. Frank Hopfgartner who's at the University of Sheffield and we've been looking at testing some of these some of the visualizations as well so that you start to see because testing is such an important part of this of this whole process it's all very well for us to identify these user groups to start to think about how we might match those needs but until you test it and again as Anthony has said it's very very difficult to really know whether you your assumptions are going to be correct so testing and iterating is going to be an important part of that and more on those visualizations there's a link there where you can find more about the visualizations that we've used in this project so still a long way to go for us I've not touched on all kinds of aspects of our services where I think we've either started to have a think about a more user-centered approach or whether we're already doing that work for instance around teaching and learning but I hope that that was a helpful sort of introduction to how we've started to make use of some of this thinking and some of these techniques and if anyone has any questions or feedback that they are unable to do today do feel free to get in touch with me thanks very much that's great thank you very much Guy and I will certainly be sort of reappraising how I look at search boxes and letter boxes going forward and actually if you could possibly share that DOI for the article in the chat that would be useful as well for colleagues so we can pick up questions that people kind of may have but thank you very much for that I'm going to pass the baton over to Evald now who is going to introduce our colleagues from Germany and lead us into the sort of second half of this morning's presentations William thank you yes we will have our next presentations or one presentation by Nino Frank she is subject specialist and head of public relations at Hildesheim University Library and by her colleague Eric Zenz she is a teaching librarian and head of information services at Leuphana University Library at Lüneburg they will talk about capturing and understanding the changing perspective and needs of our users and about new services that were created as a result and Nino and Eric will focus on a project which started in the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic and which actually fostered the cooperation between several German academic libraries when creating new online services and I now hand over to Nino and Eric yes thank you ladies and gentlemen dear colleagues thank you first for your invitation here to the our UK digital shift forum and today's special event understanding the user perspective a German UK dialogue my colleague Nino Frank from Hildesheim and myself Eric Zenz from Leuphana have already been introduced Nino and I we are both members of the tutorials in libraries network which is some kind of a grassroots initiative one could say that developed in the wake of the pandemic and which aims to connect librarians all over Germany and beyond to enable mutual support for the community in the development of tutorials and well we are very pleased to be here today and give you a short overview of this project if you breathe introduction to the network its activities and services but before we start with this overview let's first take a look back at the roots of this project at the network's beginnings and above all shed some light on the background against which the network developed and as you can imagine this is the COVID-19 pandemics the disruptive moment of this pandemic and the compulsion for digital transformation processes as a consequence of this the corona pandemic had and has noticed before all of us I think a disruptive character in many ways for example with regard to the necessity of keeping distances between people the one and a half meter rule you all know it I'm sure this means you have to keep distance what means that it's impossible to meet to communicate in larger groups and through these restrictions these limitations of opportunities in the spatial the digital becomes more and more important so the pandemic has greatly accelerated the digital transformation process as a whole people should stay home communicate digitally this is a big big change the disruption we all experienced the same in higher education so students were switched to office mode instead of going to the lecture or students were expected to study and work on their own at home using only the text materials provided by the lecturers and in the early months of the COVID-19 they got lots of text material packages of e-books and articles because this was the only digital content available for the lecturers and providing this content was the only on the fly teaching method available to most of the instructors so the shift from face to face university to temporary at least temporary distance learning online university was not so easy for most of the lecturers I think but they got better as the pandemic progressed and a lot a lot about media dialectics they tried out new features from their learning platforms and use more and more interactive tools other media types beyond digital presented texts such as video or audio social media and so on they improved online learning a lot and in parallel to this evolutionary process of improving online learning the students themselves developed their expectations towards online content and the aspirations about the quality of online learning so in the further process this described digital shift in online learning led to an increased demand situation at libraries as well here demonstrated via this curve increasingly instructors students, administrators ask now if the library could please support and create a tutorial develop a screencast for a seminar presentation with audio for lecture developing a virtual tour and 360 degree for YouTube for example so many libraries were now increasingly faced with the fact that they were not really prepared for the scenario that they were struggling a little bit to keep up with these rapidly evolving demands and to adequately meet expectations quantitatively and qualitatively and so this first curve here shows the expanding user needs, grown user needs and expectations this second curve here shows where libraries stood at this moment of course this is not empirical data as you can imagine my main purpose in doing this illustration was to show from the library's point of view this emerging wave of user expectations certainly had something threatening about it maybe like a wave of demands crashing over you the curve even looks a little bit like this I think and librarians are not always building specialists so they only have limited skills and resources to meet those demands this has been the situation the uncomfortable situation for most of the libraries I think but at the same time we are already writing this wave of higher user expectations that have long been on a path of digital transformation in the area of information literacy and for whom e-learning interactive tutorials etc. are already part of their didactical repertoire these libraries were long before COVID-19 on a high level and they too now have gained even more momentum through the coronavirus demands are continuing to develop further got better during this pandemic than developing tutorials and could so in some cases even exceed the expectations of the users what I think is important about this whole diagram the space between these two curves opens up a wide spectrum of libraries at one end of the scale libraries that are just taking their first steps in e-learning and tutorial development and on the other end of the scale libraries that are already much further along both what all have in common is that the topic is equally important for them right now and the breadth of the spectrum offers the potential to get together to join forces and to learn from each other in terms of didactics, technology software licenses and much more and maybe this final thought is what Nino had on her mind on a cold and frosty winter on the 13th of January 2021 and her design Nino Thank you Eric we are changing now from global to the local view and I'm going to tell you how the idea for this network came about in the winter of 2020 our library was still closed because of the pandemic so many of our service went through a change and surprisingly almost nobody read our extensive explanations on our website or on our blog so to reach our uses we began to create tutorials with Camtasia and for us it was learning by doing it from time to time we ran into problems to which we had to find a solution this way we still created a number of videos and uploaded them on our website we wanted them to be accessible for persons with different backgrounds so we always made three versions one normal version in German one with German subtitles and one with English subtitles after a while we had a long list of tutorials on our website and this technique became very confusing so our solution was to create a YouTube channel for our library and again we ran into problems which was rather frustrating so we said it would be really nice to have someone to talk to someone who either has the same problems or has already found a solution and of course the birth of the idea for the tutorials and libraries network then we formulated a call and sent it through the German librarian mailing list called I don't know if you know it I received the first registration seven minutes after sending it and the stream of emails did not stop until the first meeting on 3rd March 2021 we had a total of 160 registrations apparently it was not only us who had questions and this desire for an exchange so we met online via big group with 136 persons from all kinds of libraries big and small, one person libraries public libraries school and university libraries not only from Germany but also from German speaking countries like Austria and Switzerland as well our main aim is exchange an exchange of ideas obviously but also the possibility to say I have a problem is there someone who can help me or more specifically I saw that you were working with this program, I have a problem can you help me if you speak German or have learned the language you know that there is a difference when you address someone formally or informally if you use Z because we knew that this could be a problem and hinder exchange we proposed that we could call each other informally in first name spaces if someone wants to be addressed formally that is okay too however until now this hasn't happened on the contrary I always sense a small kind of relief and I offer the informal way for us it is not important in which kind of library our participants work in the background they have what matters to us is if they are interested in tutorials so back to our main aim exchange next slide please Eric this network's aim is to exchange ideas how we can create better tutorials for our users to enable our participants to do that our network is built on four pillars we have online meetings we have the TIP-AB portal we have a channel and we have a wiki on myrahazing so how do we proceed to help librarians to create tutorials or better ones for their users next slide please firstly we organize our online meetings more or less regularly we invite other network enthusiasts to share their knowledge next slide please past meetings had topics like didactic methods so we build up a narration that is interesting and informative or tools which programs and platforms can be used or voice and sound how do you create a tutorial that is worth listening to or one of our final meetings had the subject universal design of tutorials this focused accessibility and users with impairments we also had the editor Daniel who knows as a guest can be used for insights into user behavior how to find subjects for tutorials and how to attract new viewers this is very helpful because user feedback is difficult to obtain next slide please secondly we record our meetings like this one for example and make them available on the so called TIP-AB portal this portal is a service for uploading scientific videos and is provided by the technical information library in NOVA you find our videos with the hashtag tutorials next slide please thirdly we have a discord channel for questions which arise between our online meetings and need to be answered quickly we also encourage exchanging ideas discuss problems and post new findings as well as tips and tricks like have you ever written a text and nobody did the proof reading before you published it? how often did you regret it afterwards? it's the same with tutorials if you have created a video we advise you to let someone watch it someone who is not involved in the process before publishing it our experience is that when you work at it over a longer time you get lost in the details you are bound to miss things that do not work out therefore a fresher perspective helps you do not have that in your library our network has help and give you feedback next slide please our fourth pillar is wiki he used the wiki hosting service Myra Yeezy where you find all our knowledge and how to create tutorials one of our enthusiasts Frank Weitz was here today too perhaps you can say hello afterwards even has written a guide and how to guide for tutorials which you can download until now all our information is in German so if you want to translate it please feel free to do so alternatively and this is perhaps a question for our discussion do you have a British equivalent? if so we are grateful for our contact next slide please as our network is a grassroots initiative so I come to join and share and to participate our organization committee consists not only of Eric and me but also of Phillip Leisering from the university library in Magdeburg and of Frank Weitz from the library of the University in Giesel I saw at least Frank here today perhaps Phillip is here too so next slide please our outlook planning for the immediate future are these two points our next meeting breaks with our tradition to meet online we are organizing a hands-on lab at the German Library Congress in Leipzig this will be next month very soon during two hours we organize a meeting with the bar camp so because we are interested interested in the topics of our participants concerning tutorials I think this will be educating a more important fund that was too fast Eric thank you a side note on this before I have been working together for over a year to organize online meetings and presentations at different conferences but we have never met in person until now therefore the hands-on lab in Leipzig will be our first live meeting and I am very curious to find out if we recognize each other our next point is collaborations we are opening our network for collaborations outside of libraries we think that there are topics we have in common with museums for example like Guy showed perhaps we can talk after that or with other forms of educating users like podcasts in one of our next online meetings our guests will be the team around the podcast eBitter they aim to explain how scientific libraries work focusing for us on many levels especially in how they create the episodes with their users in mind so that concludes my part in our talk so now the final slide please if you want to know more about our network you can find all our information on informatsums.com.de with all the links to our covers if you have any questions ask us now or write us an email well thank you Nino and Eric for this inspiring presentation and for sharing this very impressive example of cooperating even during the pandemic and working closely together even if you can't meet face to face thanks so much any questions please feel free to ask questions in English or in German or post them in the chat please don't all rush at once so I'm going to look back to Anthony I saw Anthony had a question about the connectors program at Sussex University initiative that you've been able to cap into that's correct yes I guess to give an idea of the kind of commitment the students are able to give to us currently the project we've got around the service blueprinting that's going to be about 3 months and we've got 4 students who will be working with us 4 hours a week so more than we would normally get if we were arranging user testing through the library we'd maybe be able to offer some sort of incentive and we've talked to students for half an hour or an hour so we're getting up for a large chunk of time and we're able to develop this really interesting project which is something we've not been able to do previously and that is through the university the university pay the students we put these proposals forward at the start of term that's really interesting and I think the payment side is a really interesting one as well because I know certainly we've done a variety of user testing with students at the University of Glasgow we've tended to kind of incentivize and reward them through sort of Amazon or other kind of vouchers and it's perhaps not been as sort of structured in that same way as the sort of the connectors program so that sounds like a really kind of exciting opportunity for you guys to have tapped into have tapped into that absolutely now do colleagues have questions for Guy and Anthony and Eric and Nino I'll just continue to monitor the the question for Nino in the chat Nino how do you collect feedback from your or for your YouTube tutorials that's an interesting question because it's not really easy that is one of the reasons we use YouTube because there you have the insights how viewers watch your video often when do they stop watching your videos you can see at which point they drop out and then you can look if if there's something boring or if something doesn't work out but we only have indirect feedback perhaps Frank can tell more about this because it's a kind of an expert for this are you there do you want to tell something or Eric do you want to say more about this if not Eric do you want to say something about this sorry I didn't hear the question sorry and how do we get feedback for our video tutorials and how do you do this yes we don't collect feedback at the moment that's the simple answer it's a little bit complicated in Germany maybe UK is the same with the data of the users and the comments they leave and that's a little bit problematic normally we collect data via running platforms like Sunnites or anything like this and YouTube is a little bit more problematic in Germany in general there was another question concerning the software you are using Nino already answered it in the chat it is Camtasia and Powtoon there are a lot of programs I think the list is very long from Catasia, Adobe Captivate, Adobe Presenter anything like this or OBS DaVinci Resolve there are lots of programs for different purposes like more screen casting like more doing with the camera so this is not one software we can say but a long list of typical programs that were used in the network we are starting from there is also the question of the costs because buying a license is not cheap so you have to compare what you want and if you can finance this yeah yeah resources are a problem always yes that's the way it is there is another question for you Nino did you create any content directly as the result of contacts requests from your users not in a direct way we had the problem that many students don't know how the IPN works so we created a tutorial for that because it was rather complicated to install it we had the new version and that was one of our videos which was really successful successful and Eric do you have a how do you create there were a lot of demands as I pointed out in my presentation so we got here a network different demands for example the tutorial was demanded through the library via youtube and videos for Freshman greetings anything you can imagine so there were direct demands and we tried our best to fulfill them yeah often we ask our colleagues work at the information desk because they know which questions arise regularly so that's where we get our ideas maybe there's another question from William in the chat happy to pull that in I was just kind of interested around things like Camtasia have sort of challenges with the license costs but also the challenge around upskilling staff and presenting and being able to develop those tools how have you found that and how engaged have that's the aim of the network I think so we try to come together to learn from each other we have different talks to different subjects recording video or working with it so the further development of skills of librarians concerning different tools is one of the big aims to get together in this network no absolutely but just to get said so yeah has there been quite a lot of enthusiasm and excitement perhaps not excitement but about learning these new skills and taking advantage of them I'm sorry I had a little bit of a problem with the audio so it was just to get a sense of just the enthusiasm around learning these skills because I think what you've been putting together there I think looks really great and there's been some comment in the chat that there's certainly lessons that I think we can pick up from that here in the UK often these I can say that often these programs or platforms offer tutorials on their own so you can educate yourself and these are really good especially Camtasia offers really good tutorials on different aspects of their program that's great thanks very much and I might add that we have more colleagues with Camtasia experience and that's because we are running the learning management system of our university in our library and that means that we have a lot of contact with lecturers we have a lot of technical demands and the administrator and his colleagues are in our library the computer center does all the hardware and software stuff like updates etc but when it comes to user support that's us and that's always challenging of course but sometimes it's also rewarding because we had to do with Camtasia and other software even before this horrible pandemic started and we had to let's put it that way it gave us the chance to use Camtasia and other software in another context that helped and I might add our colleagues were enthusiastic about learning this new skill perhaps we are lucky but they really liked it and I also enjoyed to work with that and to learn this because it's so helpful in many ways yes and I think enthusiasm is a key factor in learning new tools that's another question what kind of videos do you create just talking to students or do you have screen shot videos showing how to use e-resources with voice overs etc talking to students please keep in mind this project started when our library was closed and when there were no students on campus and students got back slowly and it's not before the beginning of this summer semester that we see a lot of students on campus again fortunately before the campus was kind of empty so talking to students in person was difficult but perhaps you can add on that and enlarge on that Eric or Nino sorry so the question was really around are your videos the staff talking to your students about a particular topic like you were giving a lecture kind of virtually or are you doing instructional videos specifically on how to use specific products that you have made available to your students in Hildesheim we don't film our staff I think we are kind of shy but we use animations and show how websites and especially if it's about the VPN tutorial we show how this works step by step so it's more an instruction and information than showing our staff is it different in Lüneburg Eric? No, not really I think so employees here are a little bit shy too I think but we have students here that are actors too in parallel and we asked them if they could do the job for us and play a role in this video tutorial and give a short virtual tool through the library and they did a very good job and that was a good solution and was not too expensive I think because she was a student that was our solution for shyness Thanks very much Eric I think about just bringing Antique in there as well so you kind of commented just in the chat there you were kind of using a mix of a sort of mix of those sort of material We were doing some of the screencasts that we normally do we use a tool an institutional tool called Pinopoto to make those we had used Camtasia previously but one platform that we started making a lot of use of over the pandemic was Instagram Live because we already had a lot of followers on Instagram and what this allowed us to do was to have we did tours of the library so as the kind of space was evolving in stages we would do regular kind of live remote tours as opposed to a video that might date within a week or two and we were doing live Q&As with the student union as well so they'd come in and speak to us and we'd talk about what the current policies were and again we might update that in a couple of weeks time if things had changed and that was a really useful way to get up to date information on our dynamic services out there by using Instagram Live Thanks very much Antique and if I can actually leads me to sort of a wider question for all of you and I think having kind of pivoted to things like Instagram Live have you found and obviously use of YouTube and things I'm not going to ask which is which is better obviously you get different means of production and so on but have you found that really effectively harnessing social media has actually really helped some of that engagement and that user experience that I think we're all trying to achieve depending on how you actually how you actually use it and where you fit it in to the mix? I think so yes and I think pushing the information out through channels where students and our users already are is always helpful as well instead of expecting them to necessarily come to us kind of yeah moving into their spaces has been really helpful and I think we've definitely through those Instagram videos so the library tools we're getting sort of 600 views which is far more than we would have got on a physical library tool sort of years back so we were certainly getting to a wider audience and may I ask one question Anthony do you have discussions about this because using social media in Germany is often different discussions if it is okay to use these do you have this at your institution too or is this a German thing? I think we do we have a team actually and a working group that look around how we kind of promote and use social media and I think they have those kind of discussions in those meetings thankfully I just get to sort of do it and someone else has to worry about the consequences do you use tiktok? we don't at the moment no although I discovered and I wasn't aware of this how popular it is particularly in supporting chemistry students and how many kind of chemistry experiments are on tiktok so I think that's a really kind of fascinating channel for us to explore I think another one that we don't use a lot of and these are the sort of insights I think you get from working with students regularly was when I last met the student connectors and asked them how they would like to communicate through this project whether they'd like to use teams or zoom or they all said Slack and Slack isn't a channel that we currently use in the library it's one we're aware of and one that we tried briefly at the start of the pandemic but this particular group of students is all that they use and what do you use to communicate? so we'll use Slack and I'll upskill myself quickly that's the plan. Okay and in your library because we had a chat program installed to communicate during home offers and for us it was really great it is really great we're still using it yeah we mainly use Microsoft teams for that kind of communication between library staff and then our chat service is a platform called The Lock so just to follow up on that Leanne do you want to unmute and ask your can I just follow up with that Yes I'm just wondering if because most universities have a kind of reputation to maintain in the wider academic communities and possibly even on a global scale do you have to involve anyone at kind of the head of your institutions in terms of what content you place on social media to ensure it doesn't do anything to affect your kind of institutions brand or reputation I'm curious whether you're able to do things in-house yourselves or whether you have to be mindful of what you're putting out there not just your students I can probably say something about because obviously within the University of Reading the social media for the Museum of English Rural Life is massively bigger even though now main institutional presence on particularly on Twitter and so that's been a really interesting position to be in and obviously we've used it in a very light hearted way a very engaging way and I think that's been I think that was surprising to the institution I think it was surprising to us but I think it shows that I mean I think firstly universities are yes are corporate bodies but they're also places where that should at least be encouraging free debate and discussion so within the parameters that you'd expect in terms of normal social media management and then I think it's been I think it's fine I don't think most places are expecting I mean the university is going to have hundreds of social media accounts from different departments and they're not going to be managing most of those corporately unless there's something really important that they would do I think quite often social media managers are meeting with each other and agreeing guidelines and good practice and ensuring that happens but I think in the end it's going to come down to the sort of risk appetite of the institution and where it's going to be but I think one of the things that we've discovered or shown possibly or both is that it's possible to be actually quite daring and quite innovative in terms of use of social media and I think certainly museums and libraries in many ways and archives have in some ways led some of that kind of helping people to engage with institutions that if you were to go to their normal digital presence might seem quite forbidding actually I think the social media has been a way of saying actually we're people here behind that corporate slick website there are people who can joke and can talk about important things and can talk about unimportant things and can engage with you so I think social media has a really strong role in terms of that and I think if you shut it down and say you can't we're going to check every tweet you'll just kill it off you need to be responsive as well you need to be actually not just putting out the content it's actually being able to respond to what people are saying and interacting so thanks very much Guy and Lisa I haven't clicked on the link in your chat yet so but it looks as if Liverpool have started using TikTok I don't know if you want to unmute and see a little bit about that just as part of this social media segment of this morning hi yeah so hi everyone well as I said in the little message really I don't know very little about it but we've got quite an active Twitter presence and Instagram presence at the University of Liverpool library there is a university as I'm sure there is in many places there is a university kind of policy on using social media but as we've just heard we really feel that it's important to show the people behind the services and that really came to the fore in the pandemic so I'm glad to say that you know we've got lots of library staff who are way younger than me really much more technical than me and know how all of this stuff works and so they just kind of keep putting things out it's all authorised it's not that they just put things out really nearly but yeah we are exploring how we can just make the library seem a more human kind of space really onto a better way of putting it thank you that is totally fascinating because you mentioned that you need staff who is who wants to do this who is enthusiastic about doing this we get good videos and for TikTok we don't have that because we are no TikTok users but I always have this in mind because I think it's a channel for younger students who use it regularly but we don't use it yet but it's possible that this is coming in the near future or not in the near future but in the future I think that's right if you have to almost force people to do something like this it doesn't work you can tell there has to be that enthusiasm because the enthusiasm comes across and it's largely our customer services our front of house our desk staff who do a lot of the social media so it's not necessarily the liaison team who do the teaching it is our customer services staff who are happy to just get a bit more involved in something a little different so we're quite lucky I think anything that involves the seagulls at Liverpool always goes down very well, we have lots of seagulls around the library I've just put in the chat a link to the Black Country Museum which is the museum that I suppose took off most in terms of its engagement with TikTok for a small regional museum in the English midlands to have a piece of social media content that gets nearly 30 million views it shows the power of these things and I think maybe I'm going to be provocative here maybe we should be asking the question why on earth are we not on TikTok rather than maybe we should be so yeah I'd encourage people to check that out it's really lovely content as well it's just the volunteers in the museum just talking about what they do so it is that human connection that's why it's been so successful I think