An ethnography in the Library (“an ethno-what?”)
Hello again. In case you haven’t read my last post about interning at the University Library, my name is Henry, and I’m doing an internship in Library Communications this summer. I’m actually just about to finish the internship (cry) and it’s been an incredible experience. One of the best things has been having to get to grips with different tasks every day, and work with various teams throughout the summer.
At the start I was mainly working closely with the Communications Team, however a large part of the internship has been planning and conducting my own ethnographic project. As an anthropology student, I’ve carried out ethnographies before and I am fascinated by how people function and interact. My focus for the project was space within the Library, and I wanted to see how users feel about the issue.
The first step was to identify different methods of obtaining feedback from users; in other words, what would make people talk? Being a student, I know that if there’s one thing that’s going to get me to cooperate, it’s free food, particularly free chocolate. Chocolate doesn’t lie.
So, it was decided that in order to get the ball rolling I would stand outside the Main Library with a feedback board and ask users to write a post-it note about a particular topic, receiving a free brownie as payment. We ran this twice. On the first day, we asked participants to “describe the Library in one word”, and the second time – as it was during Grad Week – I asked participants “what is your favourite Library memory?” Once they’d done this, the brownie was all theirs.
Realising the power of the chocolate, I also used this as an opportunity to get sign-ups for focus groups, which would give me an invaluable amount of data to work with. So, a sign-up sheet was strategically positioned for people to see as they collected their brownie.
The boards received an imaginative variety of responses. From “labyrinth” to “paradise”, there were 47 words to describe the Library on the first board, giving a wide range of user feedback. At first, people seemed to think they ought to say nice things about the Library since they were getting a free brownie, but I assured them they could be as honest as they wanted! There were also a lot of favourite Library memories from students, particularly about finishing assignments and socialising with their friends.
Once the boards were full up with students’ feedback (and the students were full up with chocolate), my next job was to sort and code them all. Admittedly, this might not sound particularly interesting, but using the very helpful tool NVivo (available for members of the University through IT Services Apps Anywhere), I was able to see which types of comments were the most frequent and important. Typically, comments about space, noise and temperature were among the most common.
Using the list of sign-ups for focus groups, I then sent an email round asking for participants’ availabilities for the coming week, so we could arrange a convenient time. Once I’d received the replies, we picked a time, booked a study room, and went ahead with the focus groups. I ran two groups, with a mixture of Postgrads and Undergrads. Running a focus group is a difficult task sometimes, and it is interesting to see which parts of discussion are most important to people. Generally, lots of the students agreed on certain issues, although there were some definite differences of opinion, which is no bad thing! Participants received a voucher for taking part, and the information they gave proved insightful for my research.
The groups were audio recorded to help me capture the data accurately, which meant the next step was to transcribe it all. As anyone who has ever done transcription before will tell you, it is one of the slower tasks to complete; it took me the best part of two days to transcribe two hours’ worth of data. Who knew people could say so many words in such a small space of time? However, it’s a necessary part of the process and a very useful skill to pick up.
Once I’d got the transcripts in front of me, I got stuck into coding them as well, which is also a heavy task to complete. Getting to grips with Nvivo is a brilliant advantage, and allows you to see which things are being spoken about the most. For instance, there were lots of comments about users who prefer silent spaces to social areas, whereas others seemed to want to talk more about resources and computers. Coding them helped me to make sense of what might otherwise seem like a pretty long conversation. After transcription and coding were complete, I did a little victory dance. Then I typed up my findings in a report in order to condense my research into a cohesive document. Being able to see my hard work presented properly was perhaps the most satisfying part of the project.
All in all, my ethnography in the Library was an insightful and pretty fun few weeks. I spoke to people from all different parts of the Library (and the University) and got to understand how users feel about different aspects of their individual Library experiences. I dished out brownies, recorded, transcribed and coded. As with a lot of things, hard work always pays off.
So, that’s a brief summary of what my research project and my summer in Library has been like. This internship has been one of the highlights of my time at University, and one which I would recommend to anyone. Looking back, it’s been a brilliant time and I’m actually looking forward to coming back in September (strangely, that was not sarcastic). Henry out.
Henry Ford