Top of page

Can you help? Seeking people to take part in user research

Share this post:

Experimenting toward the Digital Strategy

Visualization of the American English Dialect Recordings Collection in Citizen DJ.
Visualization of the American English Dialect Recordings Collection (held by the American Folklife Center) in Citizen DJ, a recent experiment from LC Labs.

In LC Labs we work collaboratively across the Library of Congress, and with external partners, to advance and the agency’s Digital Strategy. We do this through experimentation, engagement and research. We try approaches and explore technologies that could help us connect with users, share our resources in new ways, and cultivate an innovation culture. By doing small-scale projects in these areas, we gather evidence and insight, which we then try to share as widely as possible. The outcomes of these project can help inform future decisions and directions for how the Library uses technology to serve its vision and mission. 

In an upcoming year-in-review post, we’ll share more about our experiments in 2020. Our experiments in the last year have focused on exploring methods to open up collection to new kinds of engagement, research, and use. Those methods include machine learning, crowdsourcing and remixing. This year we want to build on what we’ve learned about theses methods and focus on how users are included, represented, blocked, served, harmed, or helped when we apply these new approaches and technologies to connect the Library to the public. 

Can you help shape our next experiments?

Several of the experiments we are planning for 2021 involve phases of research and testing with users. The Library has vast collections available online that reflect the knowledge, culture, and complexity of our nation and the world which are accessed by thousands of people everyday to learn, research and create. Because the Library exists to serve Congress and all Americans, we want to learn about the goals and needs of people who, right now, are not connected to and using the Library. We want to know more about what these users might need, their motivations and the potential barriers they experience in using the Library’s resources.

We are recruiting people who use digital resources–like historic photos, articles, books, documents, newspapers, music, video, maps, data or websites–in their work, life or studies but don’t use the resources provided by the Library of Congress. Our partner in this research is Digirati, they will use what we learn about people and their experiences to help the LC Labs team explore ways to make the Library’s collections and resources more useful to more people. 

Do you know anyone who would be willing to (virtually) sit down and talk with us?   

Logistics for the interviews

With the selected participants, we will carry out 1-on-1 interviews (not to exceed an hour). All interviews will be conducted remotely, over video chat. The schedule for the interviews will be based on what works best for the participants. 

Please get in touch with us if you know anyone who can help with this research by going directly to this sign up form, managed by Digirati. If you have any questions about the research you can email [email protected].

Thank you very much for any help or advice you can provide. Hearing from people who don’t yet use the Library of Congress’s digital resources will be incredibly useful as we continue to design a program of experimentation that will help us achieve our vision to connect the Library with all Americans.

Comments

  1. I would like to rejoin the program.

Add a Comment

This blog is governed by the general rules of respectful civil discourse. You are fully responsible for everything that you post. The content of all comments is released into the public domain unless clearly stated otherwise. The Library of Congress does not control the content posted. Nevertheless, the Library of Congress may monitor any user-generated content as it chooses and reserves the right to remove content for any reason whatever, without consent. Gratuitous links to sites are viewed as spam and may result in removed comments. We further reserve the right, in our sole discretion, to remove a user's privilege to post content on the Library site. Read our Comment and Posting Policy.


Required fields are indicated with an * asterisk.