Discovering Digital Scholarship

In the Spring semester, I joined a co-op within one of my professional librarian groups. Our committee chair has a lofty goal: To create a rubric with which academic librarians can use to compare AI tools that will, hopefully, stay relevant for more than 6 months. At first, I was unsure of what I could do to assist the group. It was when I saw their draft personas where much of the prep work clicked for me. I had done this before — in class and in practice — writing for an audience.

Creating personas in our previous course was an eye-opening moment for me. It had long frustrated me that I didn’t understand why my ideas and explanations had been confusing or unclear to others. When I began to write for others, in my courses at GMU, internship, and career, I realized I had never written for anyone but myself. I was the only one who ever needed to understand myself.

In our co-op, we have 4 personas: librarians of different career points, institutions, and field specialties. For my job, I have three personas: a faculty member, a student, and a member of the public. When I write for World History Commons during this internship, I have 3 personas: a middle/high school teacher, a middle/high school student, and a parent of a student. The challenging part is having to write for every persona in mind at almost all times.

Does the exercise work? I would say “yes — most of the time.” To take full advantage of a persona, the author needs a personality that accurately reflects the needs and problems of the demographic the persona is representing. When writing for a high school teacher, I initially wrote as if I were writing to someone in a scholarly position. The educator has an advanced degree and speaking in any other way felt inappropriate and demeaning. This was until I discussed the issue with my instructor. I learned that, sometimes, even users with degrees in higher education have the need for a block of text that does not read like a 20-page, peer-reviewed article. Sometimes, they need information that is factual, but also easily digestible.

The overall lesson: creating personas isn’t a quick fix. If you don’t know your potential user well enough, you can’t predict their needs. But once you’ve crafted a decent adaptation of a user, they’re the perfect guardrails keeping your writing from swerving too far in an unhelpful direction. As long as I’m writing for the public to see, I’ll be crafting at least a couple personas before I do so.