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Wired West: Volume 12, no. 1

SLA Conference 2008 - Conference Report, Part 2

By Lena Kuzmina

The official numbers from SLA’s 2008 annual conference in Seattle are quite impressive: 5,011 total registrants, 1,681 exhibitor registrants, and 464 booths.
My report will cover the sessions that I attended and found valuable as well as some highlights of the conference.

How to Meet Researchers’ Changing Expectations

Speakers: John Law, ProQuest vice president, and Mike Buschman, IEEE client services manager

Law’s and Bushman’s presentations were based on their recent studies conducted to better understand how users perform research. They talked about the research behaviours of students and older researchers and provided recommendations on how to make libraries more relevant to the research process.

Both presenters talked about the new generation of researchers. Millennials don’t ask for help, they consider themselves experts at finding information (Millennials research patterns seemed to be a recurring theme at the conference). Older researchers, on the other hand, are more likely to call a colleague before embarking on their research mission.
Law emphasized that “The online library environment must keep pace with escalating user expectations or risk becoming irrelevant to the user community”.
Why users don’t use library resources? According to the Proquest’s reseach results, the main inhibitors are:

• Lack of awareness
• Difficulty navigating library website to locate appropriate e-resources
• Search catalogue front and center, for articles

How could a library attract users to a library site and resources? Law provided researchers’ “wish list”:

• Make resources discoverable
• Simplify e-resources page design
• Have a clear library starting page that seamlessly takes users to the library’s resources
• Address user perception that “the online catalogue represents all library resources”
• Build awareness

 - In person
 – Via “library marketing”…
Following is a link to the presentation slides: http://www.proquest.com/promos/resources/sla_hottopicsession.shtml

Elena Kuzmina is Library Manager at Natural Resources Canada Library.

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