Who are Trevor, Darrell, Katie, Chloe, Lisa, Stacy, and Xiaowen?

Thanks to the HathiTrust User Experience Advisory Group, we now have a set of “personas” representing HathiTrust users.   For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, personas are composite fictional portraits created to represent different user types who might use a given service or product in a similar way. The purpose of the personas is to help HathiTrust staff and partners (developers, policy makers, user experience designers and researchers, reference and instruction librarians, etc.) envision different types of HathiTrust users in a more concrete way in order to inform our work.

The HathiTrust personas are available for use: http://www.hathitrust.org/documents/HathiTrust_Personas.pdf. An overview of the project is available on the HathiTrust web site: http://www.hathitrust.org/personas, and includes a project report detailing the methodology used to develop the personas.

From scholars to enthusiasts to genealogists, these personas may help you to better understand our HathiTrust users.  Definitely worth looking at!