Feedback from Library personalisation focus groups

Library Services is working on developing personalised services based on what we know about your interests and your previous use of the library. For instance we've developed a tool that shows recent resources you've opened in order to read the full text. After running a survey about library services tailored to you, we identified several personalised tools that OU students would find useful. 

To find out more about what students would expect from these tools we ran two online focus groups using Elluminate with a total of 11 students. Each focus group lasted for an hour and a half with a mix of group discussions and smaller breakout discussions. The focus groups were successful and we were able to get really useful feedback from students. Students were generally very much in favour of personalisation tools and felt that these could really benefit them in terms of finding useful information and managing their information.

Highlights from focus groups

After a general discussion exploring some of the challenges students face when using the Library we moved on to discuss in detail the most popular personalisation tools from the survey. Here’s a summary of the comments from a discussion on the recommendations tool (automated) to give you a sample of the feedback we were able to get.

Feedback on the Recommendations tool

• Would save time
• Help find relevant information
• Displays areas of interest
• Relevance is key
• Might swamp the Library website
• Needs to be relevant
• Should not be obtrusive – should be able to open it to view the items
• Should be able to delete irrelevant items
• Should be able to state type of information interested in
• Could include learned journals, newspaper articles, audio and video
• Needs to be specific – takes you directly to an item
• Databases not appropriate as recommended items

Access to the tools

The majority of students in our focus groups felt that they should be able to access personalisation tools from their module site. It was generally felt that you shouldn’t have to leave your module site to go to the Library site to access the tools. Some students also wanted to see the tools on the Library website, and email was also mentioned. Concerns were raised about the amount of information already on these sites and we will need to consider this when we design the tools. Several students specified that they would want to be able to open and close the tools and not have them present all of the time.

We also explored an idea suggested by a student from the survey of a ‘Library Shelf’. This would be a virtual, personal space where you could access the personalisation tools and store/manage items recommended to you, or items that you have found independently. The idea was popular with students in the focus group and this is something that we would like to explore further as we develop our prototypes.

Next Steps

The focus groups provided us with some really valuable feedback on the types of tailored services that students would like and some of the detail around how these should work. The next phase of the project will be to develop specifications for personalisation tools based on our findings from the survey and the focus groups. These tools will then be prototyped and students will be invited to test the prototypes and comment via email. We will also explore new personalisation ideas identified through the comments on the survey.