Observation: The Fairway on E 86th

INFO 601-02 – ASSIGNMENT 3 – OBSERVATION – MADDY NEWQUIST

The first item on my list was lemons and I found them easily; then I turned up another aisle, and there were more lemons—ostensibly the same kind, but a different price. And although it was easy to realize that I had simply been moving too quickly and had initially grabbed organic lemons by mistake, it did make me start thinking about signage (and consumer traps!) and how the shoppers in a grocery store interpret that signage, and so the setting felt appropriate for this blog post about the observation of an information environment. I returned to the store a couple weeks later to view it as both a shopper trying to make the most efficient use of their time and an observer taking notes on how well I was able to accomplish that task.

Physical Layout

Constraints on the environment are perhaps owed to the fact that this is a two-story store with the check-outs and the exit existing only on one floor—the same as the entrance. And while this is an unchangeable feature of the space, it is absolutely necessary point out how well the internal staircase is camouflaged. (Three elevators line the back wall, but who has the time?) There is one sign and it is easy to miss, especially as it is positioned well above most people’s line of sight and is only marked on one visible side. It also only makes note of the meat and fish departments being downstairs, ignoring two larger details: (a) that it is pointing to/at stairs and not just informing people that somehow they need to get downstairs, and (b) that all departments save those for produce and cheese were located downstairs.

Consumer Navigation

I couldn’t find the peanut butter. I’d waited too long to ask for help and I wasn’t going to fold now—for whatever reason, I needed to prove that I could do this in spite of my resistance to ask for or seek out help at the beginning of my search. Doesn’t that sound familiar? Kuhlthau’s Information Search Process, although primarily applied to students in a paper-writing capacity, felt like an apt lens through which to view my, and really anyone’s, travels and travails through a grocery store:

At initiation, I recognized the need for new information so that I could complete my shopping: I had to know where things were in this particular store. At selection, I picked items on my list to begin searching for as a way to become familiar with general navigation. Exploration and formulation were the biggest obstacle for me, as well as for Kuhlthau’s original study subjects, and I could only reach stage five’s collection after asking an intermediary or finally locating signage directly relevant for my search. I achieve search closure at both the location of each object on my list, and in the check-out line.

Although upon looking back it maybe shouldn’t have surprised me so much, but I did find it surprising how little interaction there was between user and digital technology, unless it’s through an intermediary—cashiers, or employees weighing meat or fish behind counters. Intermediaries were available during the shopping experience and it was at the discretion of the shopper-user to seek them out. And although there were more employees (and all willing to help) visible than at other grocery stores, none were there just to help direct users.

But with the sheer amount of signage, despite whether or not each sign actually imparted information, it felt like the store was saying to its shoppers: Why would you need us to help you? Can’t you figure it out yourself? Look at all the signs we made to make it easy for you!

Suggestions

My general difficulty with navigating this information environment came from the overwhelming proliferation of signage. Without sacrificing the necessity of grocery stores to send their users on a bit of a wild goose chase in order for them to stock up on items they may not have on their original shopping lists, I would suggest a focus on these three action items to start:

  • A better typographical system: while real estate on an individual sign is limited, it is even more difficult to decipher when categories are formatted as run-in lists, separated only by commas, rather than by columns which are easily deciphered visually.  The size of the font is also difficult to read, and it felt that the aisle number was given superficial importance over this.
  • Often supermarkets will have a general index attached to the end of each (or every other) aisle, which serve as a quick guide for both employees and users. An info guide such as this, or a blueprint map by department (similar to the ones they have in IKEA stores), would be a helpful addition to a user’s experience.
  • A clearer labeling of store staples with a typography setting it apart from the other signage would help call out the stairs, elevators, checkout lines with restrictions (e.g. “15 items or less”), and even the entrance and exit.

Reflection

This observation setting could explore Buckland’s information-as-process (reading and interpreting signs to varying degrees of success) definition, but it is also an interesting look at how an information environment assumes certain inherent knowledge or ability to navigate its internal system from its users. While I’m not sure I can quite claim “hard-to-reach users” as a factor here, there are some barriers to entry (or at least to efficient use of the space), with increasing specificity: (a) knowledge of how grocery stores are generally laid out (i.e. produce near the entrance); (b) knowledge of how Fairway (or other chain brand) stores are generally laid out; and (c) knowledge of this specific [Fairway] location. This relates back to the first two stages of ISP, and can further be applied to suggestions for improvement. Through this observation, I gained a greater appreciation for the balance retail businesses must maintain between helping and leading astray their users; and I am convinced that there is a way to stabilize that balance without sacrificing one or the other.

References:

Buckland, M. K. (1991). Information as Thing. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 42(5).

Kuhlthau, Carol (2004). Seeking Meaning: a process approach to library and information services. London: Libraries Unlimited.

For further reading on grocery stores as information environments:

Ocepek, M. G. (2017). Passive information behaviors while grocery shopping. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 54(1), 507-510. doi:10.1002/pra2.2017.14505401058

#1Lib1Ref Event: Librarians Going on the Offensive

INFO 601-02 – Assignment 3 – Event Attendance – Maddy Newquist

On February 1, 2019, I attended an event at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus called “1 Librarian 1 Reference,” which was hosted by ASIS&T @ Pratt Institute and sponsored by Educators for Wikipedia at Fordham, Wikipedia Library, and Wikimedia Affiliates. The event’s tagline was: “Imagine a World Where Every Librarian Added One More Reference to Wikipedia.”

1 Librarian 1 Reference, or as it is referred to on their social media, #1Lib1Ref, is a global campaign organized by Wikipedia and its university workgroups to inspire librarians and other information professionals to contribute to Wikipedia articles—except that, instead of editing or writing articles, they would be providing citations for the content within the articles.

Why It’s Needed

Every Wikipedia user, from the casual interest reader to a researcher looking to flesh out a bibliography, has seen it. Instead of brackets containing a superscript number linking to a footnote, there is a bracket that looks like this: [citation needed]. The user has no way of knowing if the sentence(s) that precede this bracket are accurate, and the task of corroborating it is daunting—if the editor who added the fact couldn’t find it, when so many others had not hit obstacles in citing their own facts, how deep and challenging of a dive would it be to the user? The 1 Librarian 1 Reference campaign uses that lack of reliable sourcing as its base mission, hoping that both the immediate and long-term effect will be a benefit to Wikipedia users around the world.

The event began with a brief description of the goals of the event and the campaign at large, as in the paragraph above, as well as a wink and a nod to the fact that information professionals are the ones best suited to this task (more on that below). Attendees were then given a tutorial on general article editing and more thoroughly on the guidelines for adding citations. Afterwards, we were provided with a list of web-based databases that aggregate all the [citation needed] instances across Wikipedia, either by category, article, or even paragraph, and then were effectively set loose.

Our Responsibility to Transparency

Beyond the surface layers of providing an essential component to a reference encyclopedia, its users, and community, this event feels strongly, albeit subtly, relevant to the information field and the challenges it faces as digital resources become more available and library users increasingly value their independence and personal agency in finding the resources they need on their own.

Having librarians interact with Wikipedia is especially important because it continues to teach them about how the public/users search for information. The decades-long debate around information literacy is interesting to look at in conjunction with this campaign. If librarians and information professionals are meant to rethink the “’one-size-fits-all approach’ to information literacy” as Pawley suggests (446), why not treat Wikipedia as worthy of our time and effort in teaching users how to access information? Not only can we learn more about the ways in which users go looking for information, especially on a site that is, by design, user-controlled and user-organized, but we can lean into users becoming active agents in their search. Tewell points out that librarians are becoming increasingly invisible in the process—if we take opportunities such as this event to bolster information literacy from behind the scenes, we are helping the move away from the “traditional banking system” of education, so that students may teach themselves from equally trustworthy sources and be able to verify the path of information for themselves (27).

Share the Power

It also felt interesting to take a look at this event and its goals through the concept of the neutral librarian. As we’ve discussed in class, as well as seen in the Schwartz & Clark 2002 article “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” librarians, and their institutional counterparts, cannot afford to be neutral—their interaction with historical documents and the people who interact with them makes it nigh impossible. Although Schwartz & Clark are referring to archives when they note that archivists have “enormous power over memory and identity,” their call for the power of archives to “no longer remain naturalized or denied, but opened to vital debate and transparent accountability” feels especially transferable in the context of the 1 Librarian 1 Reference campaign. Librarians are gatekeepers, in both its positive and negative connotation, of information, and by taking part in the verification and validation of a public access resource in one really strong and clear way to begin the process of transparency of information creation, not least by linking to accredited sources that the public cannot find on its own.

A Final Takeaway

The leaders of the event emphasized that we didn’t have to solve every citation problem that came up first in a database search—we were instead encouraged, if we wanted, to look for missing citations in the categories we had personal interest or backgrounds in. And while, yes, you could argue that this is more bias, I think it further helps bridge the gap between information professionals and the communities they serve, when we can experience the personal stakes that the users feel when searching for information.

References

Pawley, C. (2003). Information Literacy: A Contradictory Coupling. The Library Quarterly, 73(4), 422-452. doi:10.1086/603440

Schwartz, J. M., & Cook, T. (2002). Archives, records, and power: The making of modern memory. Archival Science, 2(1-2), 1-19. doi:10.1007/bf02435628

Tewell, E. (2015). A Decade of Critical Information Literacy: A Review of the Literature. Comminfolit, 9(1), 24. doi:10.15760/comminfolit.2015.9.1.174