What Do PatronsReallyDo in Music Libraries? An Ethnographic Approach to Improving Library Services

Abstract

Traditional approaches to gathering the data necessary to make informed decisions aimed at improving library services begin with librarians identifying issues they think may be in need of investigation. The ethnographic approach, on the other hand, allows the actions of library patrons to identify the issues of importance to their specific patron population. For this to occur, librarians must become participant observers, carefully recording what patrons do and then using the mixed methods approach to verify the findings. In this study, investigators based the methods they employed on the “sweeps” concept—an observation technique gaining popularity in current-day patron observation studies.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.