A couple of weeks ago I gave a lecture on library resources to about 20 fourth-year students. Included in the show-and-tell was our new libguide-based subject guide, and my new meebo widget. I took the opportunity to ask, “So you can contact me by phone, email, meebo, or face-to-face. Which do you think you’d be most likely to use?”<\/p>\n
The responses were: email or face-to-face. A bit disappointing (after I’d spent some time explaining to colleagues and managers the advantages of the meebo widget) but interesting.<\/p>\n
But. That was Friday. On Monday I got a Meebo query, and on Tuesday I got another Meebo query. So even though the class had said they would use some other method to contact me, 10% of them, while browsing the subject guide, saw that I was online and thought they’d contact me that way after all.<\/p>\n
I officially approve of asking users what they think about things – but it’s not perfect. The only way to be sure<\/i> whether something’s useful or not is to try it out (and market it!)<\/p>\n
[Obligatory acknowledgement that we can’t try out and market everything. But we were already using a meebo room for online reference, so adding a widget to my libguides took me less than 10 minutes.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A couple of weeks ago I gave a lecture on library resources to about 20 fourth-year students. Included in the show-and-tell was our new libguide-based subject guide, and my new meebo widget. I took the opportunity to ask, “So you can contact me by phone, email, meebo, or face-to-face. Which do you think you’d be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[192,191,68],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}