On this page

What we did and why

We wanted to learn about student interactions with the library stacks and get a sense of how often students browse the library. This information will help us make decisions about space arrangements, improve how we provide information, and better understand user behavior. For this purpose, we decided to set up a talk-back board to ask students how often they browse the shelves.

How we did it

The UX Cookbook recipe

See the [link to recipe] from The UX Cookbook.

What we found

We received 131 responses. Within this group:

56 people chose 'never,'

39 chose 'once in a while,'

26 chose 'many times a semester,'

10 indicated that they are always in the stacks.

The number of people who actually explore the stacks was higher than we expected.

As we anticipated, the main reasons people don’t browse the stacks are a lack of time and the convenience and efficiency of online resources and PDFs (Image.1). However, some other responses stood out and may be more significant. These reasons can be categorized into three groups:

1. Leisure Reading – Some people visit the stacks to find leisure reading materials. We support this through our Wildcat Reads collection, which continues to grow. However, as an academic library, our primary focus is on academic materials(image.2).
2. Difficulty Finding Materials & Lack of Awareness – Some students struggle to locate books or are unaware that browsing the stacks is an option. This is an area we could explore further and work to improve (image.3)

Image.1

Image.2

Image.3

What we did next

We documented the responses.

Now what?

[As of DATE. List any handoffs, future work, or other next steps to come.]

<aside> 🗓️ Last updated: M/D/YEAR

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