These seven templates provide an excellent starting point for the development of user personas for library communities of various types. Templates can be printed and written on as part of an ad-hoc brainstorming exercise, or edited within Adobe Acrobat or Illustrator. While user personas can be generated from staff knowledge and experiences (assumption-driven), depending on how you wish to use personas, it is recommended that you conduct user research (data-driven), either observing users interacting with the library, interviewing patrons, or drawing insight from assessment or usage data to help validate their accuracy.

See these sources for more information on creating user personas:

Clark, R. (2015). Guide to patron personas. Retrieved from:http://guides.lib.wayne.edu/personas

Goodwin, K. (2008). Perfecting your personas. Cooper.com. Retrieved from http://www.cooper.com/journal/2001/08/perfecting_your_personas

Norman, D. (2004). Ad-Hoc Personas & Empathetic Focus. JND.org. Retrieved from http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/personas_empath.html

Pruitt, J.,& Adlin, T. (2006). The persona lifecycle: Keeping people in mind throughout product design. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.

Tempelman-Kluit, N. and Pearce, A. (2014), Invoking the user from data to design. College & Research Libraries, 75(5), 616–40.