Our editorial philosophy

As user experience practitioners ourselves, we use core UX research techniques to help shape the direction of the journal.

Weave makes libraries and UX practitioners better.

Weave’s primary purpose is to provide a forum where practitioners of UX in libraries (wherever they are, whatever their job title is) can have discussions that increase and extend our understanding of UX principles, research, and design. This is our primary aim: to improve the practice of UX in libraries, and in the process, to help libraries be better, more relevant, more useful, more accessible places.

Weave is theoretical and practical.

Practitioners need to constantly re-examine the role, principles, and practice of UX in libraries. Weave should be a forum where people can do that, so the editors strive for a balance of theoretical and practical material. We want discussions of specific techniques and how to do them, but we also want to see discussions of why we are doing what we are doing and debates on the best way to do it.

Weave is for practitioners...and that means you!

Weave’s intended primary audience consists of people in libraries who are using or are interested in using UX. That means not only people whose job title or primary areas of responsibility are UX-related, but anyone at all who has an interest or stake in improving library experience for users, and that includes everyone who works in a library, from administrators to instruction librarians to catalogers.

Weave is experimental.

User experience as a field is still evolving in libraries. Because of that, aside from the grounding principles in this document, and the rules that govern the actual editorial and peer-review process, we try not to have too many rules. We try things. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. Those of us involved in creating and running Weave would like to take some risks with this journal, and try some things that might be unorthodox.

Weave is not just about the web.

In some quarters UX is still viewed narrowly as analyzing web metrics and web usability testing. Those are great things and necessary to practicing UX, but UX has extended far beyond the web and so should our conversation. We should be talking about applying UX in physical spaces and in any other context where it might be useful.

Weave publishes material of significance to libraries.

The primary focus for this journal is the practice of UX in the library setting. However, there is a lot of important work in UX happening outside libraries, and people working in libraries need to understand the broader UX picture as well if they are going to do the best work possible. The editorial board feels strongly that Weave should be library-focused, but not library-centric, and that the editors should consider submissions that would be of benefit to libraries even if they are not about libraries.

Weave is open access.

The Weave editorial board believes that the impediments to information seeking, retrieval, and use posed by restrictive licensing and misuse of copyright are among the greatest challenges in the field of library user experience. Therefore, our standard license for authors is a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY) in order to allow for the greatest possible dissemination of our authors’ work. Our authors always retain the copyright to their work, and we never charge our authors to publish in Weave. In addition, the editors strive to make Weave’s publishing process as transparent as possible, both to authors and the readership.

Weave includes both scholarly and non-scholarly material.

Important conversations about UX can take a variety of forms, and the traditional peer-reviewed article is only one of them. Weave does publish research material, for which we use a traditional double-anonymized peer review process. But the editors also publish non-scholarly pieces in a variety of formats in our Dialog Box.