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The chapter summarizes and analyzes the use of User Experience (UX) methods applied to four university libraries – two American and two from the United Kingdom, concluding whether the use of the method may be considered a tool to enhance the user’s participation inside the informational spaces. The first section provides a definition of the term UX and its usage at university libraries. The second section introduces the four chosen international university libraries. Its subsections are divided in how the projects applying UX were performed in each school. The final section compiles and analyzes the results regarding the changes made through the usage of the UX methods inside the libraries and briefly mentions the lack of its presence in Brazil.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the process and work undertaken by the library anthropologist and the Usability Task Force (UTF) for reconfiguring the library's physical and virtual spaces to meet the educational needs and expectations of users, including students, faculty, and community patrons.

Through formal usability studies and ethnographic research, the paper describes the process and work undertaken by the library anthropologist and the UTF.

Through surveys, focus groups observation data were obtained about the current study and web habits of undergraduates and faculty.

This paper presents an ethnographic approach to policy development and implementation to re‐orient the physical and virtual library environments at a large research library. Libraries and library administrators will find value in the policies established and processes outlined for the development of user‐centered learning spaces.

Phase two of the JISC funded Library Impact Data Project (LIDP) identified low library usage amongst Chinese students in comparison to their UK peers. Further research was needed to help the authors delve deeper and find out the story behind the data. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A questionnaire was distributed to all international students in the Business School to learn about their information retrieval behaviours. The response was high but the survey was deliberately designed to only produce quantitative data, and the paper highlights the limitations of this data. More research using qualitative ethnography research techniques was needed to gather qualitative data to create a broader picture of student practice. Methods utilised included the retrospective process interview and cognitive mapping (both used by Andrew Asher in the ERIAL project). Questions from the survey were sometimes used as prompts in the qualitative process.

The data are still to be coded and analysed but one of the main findings is that students are unaware of the research help that they can get from their academic library. Ethnographic research methods gave more inroads into finding the story behind the LIDP than quantitative research methods.

Ethnographic research in libraries is still in its early days in the UK. It could help those library professionals who are hoping to practice similar research methods.

The purpose of this paper is to share how the maturing value and impact model at The University of Sunderland is enabling the author to generate evidence and articulate the insights. The author draws from that evidence to inform and underpin the strategic service planning, resourcing and reporting.

The author will demonstrate how impactful articulation of these insights through data visualisation is enabling the author to employ thought leadership in the relationship management with stakeholders by increasing their understanding of the benefit of engagement with the service offers and demonstrating value for money and the value and impact of the role in achieving institutional objectives. The paper will give an overview of the key techniques of the model and will then demonstrate its practical applications using the following examples: how the model is underpinning the approaches to thought leadership in relationship management by enabling the author to effectively generate and articulate evidence to inform strategic faculty action plans; how the model has enabled the authors to develop a new graphical approach to annual reporting. By combining the variety of data sets generated by the model, the author is able to articulate the outputs and impacts of cross-service holistic service offers and clearly demonstrate how institutional strategic objectives are fulfilled.

The author will discuss the key findings including: the importance of embedding the model at the heart of the service culture – both in terms of involving staff in data generation and of developing an evidence-based culture of service planning; the benefit of meaningful data, analysis and insights in helping to inform and underpin strategic conversations and relationship management; the transferability of the model across service settings; the agility of a snapshot approach in enabling the authors to evidence and inform current strategic service priorities; the impact of a “rounded narrative” technique in articulating powerful human insights which demonstrate engagement, impact and value; and the importance of creative data-visualisation techniques in communicating the insights for maximum impact with the customers and stakeholders.

This case study demonstrates the approach taken to fulfil a specific strategic need at one UK HE institution. Therefore, the readers are encouraged to consider the approach within that context.

This paper shares how a strategic approach to capturing and communicating value and impact evidence can contribute to thought leadership in articulating library impact.

The purpose of this paper is to use spatial thinking (space-time) as a lens through which to examine the ways in which the socio-economic conditions and values of the post-Fordist academy work to diminish and even subsume the immaterial affective labour of librarians even as it serves to reproduce the academy.

The research question informing this paper asks, In what ways does spatial thinking help us to better understand the immaterial, invisible and gendered labour of academic librarians' public service work in the context of the post-Fordist university? This question is explored using a conceptual approach and a review of recent library information science (LIS) literature that situates the academic library in the post-Fordist knowledge economy.

The findings suggest that the feminized and gendered immaterial labour of public service work in academic libraries – a form of reproductive labour – remains invisible and undervalued in the post-Fordist university, and that academic libraries function as a procreative, feminized spaces.

Spatial thinking offers a corrective to the tendency in LIS to foreground time over space. It affords new insights into the spatial and temporal aspects of information work in the global neoliberal knowledge economy and suggests a new spatio-temporal imaginary of the post-Fordist academic library as a site of waged work.