I was about two years in to my library career when James Neal visited the University of Leeds to give a talk to us staff. He talked about how libraries are designed the wrong way around - we start with the stock and then consider the people, but libraries are about people first and foremost and should be built that way.*
That made a huge impression on new-professional me and I’ve been banging the drum for people-centered policies and designs ever since. In 2015 I loved Matthew Reidsma’s UXLibs keynote, in which he said:
Libraries are people, all the way down
One of the ways I like to try and get this message across to users is through the narration of our virtual tour at the University of York. Rather than have one person anonymously talk over the top, we use 5 or 6 narrators, whose names and faces and job titles appear on the screen when they start talking, to speak over different parts of the video. I really like this way of introducing users to the staff, without doing talking-heads type videos which I don’t think would hold our students’ attention.
The narrators this year are from the library, the archives, and learning services, because we’re a combined service so I wanted us all represented. Hopefully it will subconsciously remind our incoming students and staff that the library is run by, made by, brought alive by, a load of actual human beings! And hopefully they’ll feel more comfortable coming and interacting with us, and asking us questions as a result.
Incidentally, I edited the video in an app called Videoleap, which I also used to make a fun video-game style Reel for Instagram this morning - any excuse to hark back to computer games of my youth, in a legit work context!
*My memory is NOTORIOUSLY bad, and this was almost 15 years ago now, so apologies to James Neal if my paraphrasing is totally mangling the original quote!