Session 3A | When You Say Nothing at All: UX and Digital Collections
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Once a digital project has been “completed” and developers have moved on—perhaps even leaving the institution—how can the new caretakers decide how to best maintain the project? The TTU Digital Resources department originally developed Streaming Audio and Visual Experience (SAVE) as a digital collection to hold recordings of the School of Music’s graduate student recitals. In 2019, we realized that SAVE had been inaccessible from the institutional repository for at least a year. To correct this mistake and others made during the creation of this digital tool, the department reached out to the library’s User Experience department. We launched a collaborative project to gather user data and opinions to understand how Music faculty and graduate students used the recordings. This exploration would guide a decision about whether the library would attempt to improve SAVE or retire SAVE and create a new workflow for accessing recital recordings. Unexpectedly, our plan for interviewing users fell flat despite our best efforts to recruit participants from the collection’s target audience. This presentation is about how very off we were in our assumptions and how we are using this ‘fail’ to still move forward.