Snapshots of Student Life: Managed Auto-Ethnography
(CSU, Fresno)
The Madden Library of California State University, Fresno has undergone a 105 million dollar rebuilding project. The Institute of Public Anthropology (IPA) has been recruited by the Madden Library to help facilitate their desire to better serve the needs of students and to find fresh, innovative means to encourage use of their new facility. Through the Library Study, the IPA has deployed methods for acquiring data to establish insight into student life drawn from the emerging field of Design Anthropology. In particular, a “managed auto-ethnography”, has been employed to provide a better depiction of the experience of CSU-Fresno students. Students were recruited from general education undergraduate classes and asked to participate in a study in which each individual was given a disposable camera, a jottings book, a map of campus, and a list of twenty things to photograph. The participants were then interviewed by a professor and ethnography student. These interviews were held in the participants’ homes which allowed for a more intimate, natural dialogue. Information taken from the interviews were analyzed with Atlasti (a qualitative methods software program) and provided many codes that the IPA would not have otherwise found. This paper explores how the “managed auto-ethnography” method has contributed to furthering understanding of student life at CSU, Fresno as it pertains to library services.