If a student is sitting on the floor and using a chair as a desk, you think about changing the furniture in your library. If your faculty members are mailing back-ups on CDs to their mother in Arizona, you think about providing them with an easier and safer alternative. These are two examples of how seeing and understanding a “workaround” provokes changes and new ideas in libraries.
We spend a lot of time studying our faculty members, students, and even our own librarians, and we see them doing some weird things. Sometimes they find ways to use web-based tools that we never intended. Sometimes they don’t understand how to use the tools, so they improvise. For example, some faculty members who have versioning tools available to them don’t use them. Instead, they devise elaborate ways of naming their files so that later they can find the most up-to-date version of the paper they’re writing.
We have also seen people get more out of systems that they were ever supposed to by working around constraints and black boxes. In fact, this is how our own developers have managed to make our OPAC as good as it is.
What’s interesting here is how people find a way to overcome their own limitations or the limitations of the system. When we watch, ask, and pay attention to these workarounds, we learn what to improve and how to improve it, and what new features to add to existing systems.
With regard to the XC project, we already know something about the workarounds people use with our existing catalog. One of our challenges will be to identify relevant workarounds in their research, reading, and writing activities – that is, their non-catalog activities – and then see how those workarounds might possibly relate to back to XC.