摘要：Ethnography has recently experienced a series of visible moments in libraries, library practice, and library schools. While interest in ethnographically-oriented studies began to increase in libraries by the late 1990s (e.g., Mellon, 1990; Fidel, 1993; Bradley & Sutton, 1993; and Julien & Duggan, 2000), this visibility largely begins with a series of successful and influential studies of libraries in the mid-2000s: the University of Rochester’s Undergraduate Research Project, which began in 2004 under the guidance of Nancy Fried Foster (Foster & Gibbons, 2007; Foster 2013), and drew particularly on user-centered and participatory design research techniques to understand how library spaces are used, how students engage with technology, and how undergraduates go about their academic work; the 2008–2009 Library Study at Fresno State (Delcore et al., 2009), which focused on the practices and experience of student life and students’ approaches to assignments; the 2008–2010 Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries project which studied undergraduates’ research processes at five Illinois universities based on firsthand accounts of how students obtained, evaluated, and managed information for their assignments (Duke & Asher, 2012); and the 2009–2011 Undergraduate Scholarly Habits Ethnography Project which explored the information and communication technology use of undergraduates at six colleges at the City University of New York (Smale & Regalado, 2014). In the wake of these studies, library ethnography projects conducted by a variety of library practitioners increased dramatically (see Khoo, Rozaklis, & Hall, 2012 for a recent literature review), and most recently the potential of ethnography and other qualitative approaches to library policy has been the focus of the UXLibs conference and community (Priestner & Borg, 2016).
