Giana Ricci (Frick Art Reference Library)

Librarians are often asked to conduct usability testing on electronic resources and tools that are available to their patrons. Without extensive expertise in this field, librarians can feel overwhelmed or unqualified to conduct this type of work. Outsourcing a usability study can be a great way to save the time of the library staff and to allow experts to take an unbiased approach at testing your online tool or resource. Outsourcing, however, can be expensive, and many public libraries do not have access to funding that can cover this type of expert analysis. This presentation will provide an inside look at an alternative to expensive outsourcing that simultaneously connects a library to its community while providing both a learning experience for library and information science graduate students and a concrete deliverable for your usability study. In the fall of 2017, a group of librarians from the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) teamed up with a graduate class from the Pratt Institute’s School of Library and Information Science to conduct a usability test on the online art resources search portal Discovery. Launched in 2015 by the NYARC institutions, Discovery enables users to simultaneously search the NYARC libraries' local, electronic, and digital collections, as well as scholarly resources that are freely available online. The system also points to online journal articles, digitised books, and born-digital art research materials from the consortium's growing web archive collection. The primary focus of this study was to analyse user responses to web archive resources that are accessible through Discovery. Since the field of web archiving is fairly new, and standardised methods of cataloguing and display have yet to be developed, and usability testing is vital for assessing our progress and future direction in this area. At the beginning of the semester, the students at Pratt met with NYARC librarians to learn about Discovery and to assess our goals for the usability test. A team of three students then developed questions, recruited participants, performed the study, and produced a report on their findings. This work was completed under the supervision of their professor, who holds a PhD. in Information Studies and Human-Computer Interaction and coordinates the Master of Science in Information Experience Design program at the Pratt Institute. His expertise, along with the outstanding reputation of the Pratt Institute’s LIS programme, lent a sense of reliability to the study that allowed us to confidently outsource it to this group. My proposed lightning talk will discuss the experience of working with LIS graduate students to conduct a usability study on an electronic library resource tool in the hopes that other librarians in attendance at the ARLIS/UK conference will use this as a model for outsourcing their own usability tests in the future. Additionally, my presentation will examine the conclusions of the study and how NYARC staff plan to utilise the findings in order to provide the best possible user experience for the public. This presentation is relevant to all librarians who are interested in usability testing, web archives, discoverability of electronic resources, collaboration with graduate students and user experience.

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Giana Ricci is currently the Assistant Librarian for Public Services at the Frick Art Reference Library in New York City. She received an MLIS from Long Island University and an MA in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She has previously been the Samuel H. Kress Fellow for the New York Art Resources Consortium and has worked as a Reference Librarian at New York University. She currently serves on the planning committee for the 2018 Art Libraries Society of North America Conference in New York City.