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Participatory Design in Academic Libraries: New Reports and Findings

February 2014. 110 pp. $0
ISBN 978-1-932326-48-2
CLIR pub 161

PDF Download of Report (4.7 MB) >>

This is a web-only report-it is not available in print.

This report looks at how staff at eight academic institutions gained new insight about how students and faculty use their libraries, and how the staff are using these findings to improve library technologies, space, and services.

Participatory design is a relatively recent approach to understanding library user behavior. It is based on techniques used in anthropological and ethnographic observation. The report’s editor, anthropologist Nancy Fried Foster, led several participatory design workshops for CLIR from 2007 to 2013.

The report is based on a series of presentations at the second CLIR Seminar on Participatory Design of Academic Libraries, held at the University of Rochester’s River Campus June 5-7, 2013. Chapters focus on projects at the University of Colorado, Boulder; Colby College; University of Connecticut; Columbia University; Rush University Medical Center; Purdue University; Northwestern University; and the University of Rochester. David Lindahl, of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, provided the keynote.

It is the second of two volumes published by CLIR that focus on participatory design. The first, Participatory Design in Academic Libraries: Methods, Findings, and Implementations, was published in October 2012.


Creative Commons LicenseParticipatory Design in Academic Libraries: New Reports and Findings by the Council on Library and Information Resources is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.


This is a web-only report-it is not available in print.

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