Not just 'books, duh': information interaction in an academic library

Libraries are places that people visit online or in person with the specific intention of interacting with information. While library users (including schoolchildren, the reading public, university students and researchers) visit the library to gather information, they are often frustrated by library information systems. This frustration leads to users preferring more user-friendly resources (such as Google) over library resources. Libraries' user experience problems make them a rich and exciting field for Human Computer Interaction (HCI), as evidenced by (for example) Fried-Foster and Gibbons (2007) and Crabtree et al. (1997). Understanding libraries have user experience problems, Swinburne University of Technology employs the author as a User Experience Architect where her role is to provide research-based evidence to support the library in making user-centric decisions. In her work she draws on theoretical HCI, library and HCI research, and local empirical data (either from existing sources, or by applying human-computer interaction techniques to study the local population). Two examples of her current work are outlined below.