43 - Attributes of Persona Profiles for the Network of the National Library of Medicine

Background: The Network the National of Library of Medicine (NNLM) works to advance medicine and public health by providing U.S. health professionals with equal access to biomedical information and improving individuals’ access to information to enable them to make informed decisions about their health. To achieve this aim the NNLM offers funding, trainings, and other services to a variety of individual and organizational stakeholders throughout the country. The wide variety of NNLM stakeholders, both organizational and individual, possesses many different characteristics, yet each stakeholder needs to be well understood by the NNLM in order to best serve their needs.

Description: The National Evaluation Center (NEC) of the NNLM launched in May 2021. Evaluation of the NNLM program, products, and offerings has gone hand-in-hand with NEC’s efforts to better understand the spectrum of the NNLM membership. Towards this end the NEC proposed creating persona profiles, one-page documents describing user attributes in the form of characteristics, goals, motivations, and challenges, representing the NNLM member organizations and individual users. Using as a basis previous successful work on personas for the translational workforce, the NEC convened a working group with NNLM partners to develop a portfolio of NNLM member and stakeholder personas. Through this interactive poster the working group will present a sample persona with suggested attributes and ask for contributions and feedback from the audience on ways to improve the attribute list to make the personas as representative as possible.

Conclusion: Previous experience of many of the NNLM personas working group members in creating personas for user-centered design projects has assisted the team in generating an initial list of descriptive persona attributes (e.g.: goals, motivators, challenges, technical capacity, etc. with respect to NNLM resources). Such attribute lists will be applied in Spring 2022 towards creating initial personas for NNLM staff members and NNLM member organizations. The attribute list for individual members or users of NNLM’s services, however, should be sourced with direct input from individual users, who are also well-represented by attendees of the MLA annual meeting. Through this poster we aim to gain audience-informed and vetted input on a robust attribute list from representatives of the personas we aim to create.