The University of Lanarkshire: Revealed

The third annual User Experience in Libraries Conference was held in Glasgow during June 2017. As part of this, the organising committee of Matt Borg, Ned Potter and Donna Lanclos, chaired by Andy Priestner, created a fictional University of Lanarkshire Library as part of a team-based challenge that ran throughout the conference.

We then created a whole tract of ethnographic studies for conference delegates to analyse. These included cognitive maps, behavioural maps, sleep studies, unstructured interviews, and letters, all based on real ethnography undertaken at real libraries. This article outlines that process, as well as managing the challenge through the Conference itself, and reactions to the data from the delegates.