Abstract

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.

In mid-January 2015, Weave reached out to a number of librarians who are doing user experience work with the hope of instigating and documenting the conversation they might have with one another. Coming from not only academic and public libraries, but also library and information science degree programs, the assembled group of professionals is doing and thinking about library user experience in a broad set of contexts and by a variety of means.

The conversation that resulted reflects that broad range of experience. Some librarians are working inside user experience departments, where others must find a way to do UX amidst other duties (duties which also vary). Some work in job descriptions emphasizing web development, others focus on visual design and architecture and still others work primarily as ethnographers of library users. If this feature is itself a modest documenting of what library user experience can look like—at least in 2015 and in these nine different institutions—then library user experience is itself quite a large number of things.

The conversation below unfolded over email between Tuesday, January 20 and Friday, January 23, 2015. Because of the length of the conversation and the range of topics it covers, the editors have decided to run it in two segments. UX,