Can I Make A Suggestion? Your Library Suggestion Box as an Assessment Tool

Farnum, Cecile M, Baird, Catherine & Ball, Kathryn, 2011 “Can I Make A Suggestion? Your Library Suggestion Box as an Assessment Tool“, Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, vol. 6 no. 1.

This article is essentially a survey of different libraries and their attitude towards, and use of, their in-house suggestion box (electronic or real-life). The authors survey literature to come up with a list of advantages and disadvantages, then they survey and interview Canadian academic libraries to find out what they do in terms of taking and answering patron suggestions. The authors follow up with some theoretical material on customer complaints, and finish with a nice little list of Suggestion Box Success recommendations.

I liked this article because it made me think of getting back to basics as far as service, and service quality, goes. A lot of libraries, ours included, spend a great deal of money on professionalized surveys every couple of years, and then even more money on analysis. Don’t get me wrong, I think those sorts of surveys are great, very useful, and hey, I like pretty coloured pie charts and gap analyses as much as the next chick.

Mmm...Pie...Statistically Delicious!

Evidence-based practice in librarianship has meant that quantitative measures of service have tended to be favoured over qualitative – so the poor old suggestion box has gone out of fashion a bit. Big surveys give big complex results sets which can tell you lots in a terribly scientific fashion – and can also, in my experience, be chopped up and reassembled specifically to show off what a fantastic job the library’s doing. I’m not saying don’t do a big survey, just that it’s not the be-all-and-end-all of library user experience measurement.

A lot of my colleagues are dismissive of what they call the “bad-tempered crazies in the suggestion box”. I remember reading somewhere that 96% of unhappy customers will never actually make a formal complaint about a perceived bad service. So for every 1 “crazy” there are probably 24 other patrons who feel the same but wouldn’t make a formal complaint. And it’s hard to think of bad-tempered crazies in multiples of 25! Plus, happy or satisfied customers comment something like 0.0000001% of the time (just a madeup figure, but presumably not far off. When’s the last time you told the 16-year-old at McDonalds that those McNuggets you just had were perfectly pleasant and exactly as you expected them to be?) Pity the poor library which needs to be told it’s doing a good job by its patrons… in reality, you shouldn’t be seeking feedback for an ego stroke or pat on the back.

Here’s what I think a good suggestion box/feedback mechanism does well for a library:

• Just-in-time feedback: you make a change to services or introduce something new, you get feedback about it pretty much straight away.
• You can see where the holes in your marketing/information are. For instance, if you get 20 suggestions for vending machines stocking USB’s and you’ve just bought one, chances are you’re not marketing it correctly.
• Unlike in big surveys, the “question” format is open – patrons aren’t shoehorning their thoughts about library services into a Likert scale or using wording which doesn’t necessarily apply exactly to their feedback.

To make your suggestion box effective:

• Answer quickly, answer publicly, and for goodness sake don’t get defensive. They’re picking on your opening hours, not your first born child.
• Ensure that the appropriate people are answering suggestion-box questions with appropriate responses.
• Make it visible. Maybe make it multi-format – online form, by email, something concrete in the library. Any way you can make it clear that you WANT feedback from your patrons.
• And for goodness sake, don’t lock it off to “My Own University Staff And Students Only”, as you’re shutting off a large portion of potential clients (especially if you open your stacks to the public in a non-borrowing fashion.) Some of our most interesting feedback has been from librarians in other countries regarding our online services which they could see on our website.

A great article, and on a premise that’s going to become increasingly important as Universities continue scrutinizing services like libraries for value-for-money, and as fees go up and students demand not only to get what they want, but to have tangible proof that someone cares so deeply they’ll lie awake at night if said students aren’t getting what they want. So dust off your suggestion box, take a teaspoon of cement for growing a thicker skin, and let the patrons tear into you – I dare you!

So, questions for readers (please do comment!):

• Do you think Suggestion Boxes work effectively in libraries? If not, what would make this feature work better?
• Who handles the “suggestion box” at your library? How? How would you like to see the process handled?
• What’s the funniest complaint you’ve ever gotten in your suggestion box? (Come on, we all need a laugh!)

 

Recession-Friendly Library Market Research: Service Learning with Benefits

Chesnut, Mary Todd (2011) “Recession-Friendly Library Market Research:Service Learning with Benefits“, Journal of Library Innovation vol 2. no 1. pp.61-71

In this article, Chesnut profiles a very clever collaborative project her W. Frank Steely Library at Northern Kentucky University embarked on with their university Business school. Forming a committee to look at library marketing, they decided they needed a bit of a marketing makeover, and since they had no money for a consultant, they invited the marketing students at their university to do it for them.

I think this is a super idea, once you get over the cringe factor at the library management’s cheapness. In fact, if you take it as written that library management everywhere are more likely than not to be stingy when it comes to marketing/PR for libraries, inviting students with marketing theoretical knowledge is a far better idea than librarians doing it themselves…

For instance, no student who wasn't smoking superglue-laced rollies would ever have come up with "Librarians Go Gaga"

Libraries do user-created marketing all the time. The “3-minute YouTube Library Overview” style contest has run at many libraries over the last few years, and libraries I know of have tried everything from these to student testimonials, student library ambassadors (and their blogs) and “Why the library gets me good grades” essay contests, 99% of which are undersubscribed to almost to the point of students’ complete ignorance of them.

Chesnut and her library were lucky in that there was a precedent for this sort of thing at her University – students had done assessable marketing plans for other service departments on campus, so adding themselves to the list seemed relatively trouble-free. For those of us who aren’t so lucky, here are the main hurdles:

• Management buy-in. Library management in universities seem to suffer a terrible case of “Little Sister Syndrome” – desperate to help with other people’s projects and take on their chores, but when help is offered or potential help made apparent, the bottom lip comes out and “No, we can do it ourselves” comes out. This is a deeper problem than I have an answer for here – but good luck, and my heartiest congratulations to Chestnut and any other librarians who manage to convince their executives that it’s okay to let someone else do something for you, it’s probably good for them too and selfishly driven so it’s not about to shatter any of your philosophies about the way the world works.
• Lecturer buy-in. It’s probably a lot more work to administer and assess a live and in-progress marketing campaign than it is the canned static imaginary marketing plans which seem to be standard fare in these sorts of courses. So many lecturers probably just aren’t going to be sold on the extra work (real or percieved). There may also be the problem that the lecturer themselves isn’t a library fan – not active dislike, but one of those types who’s never set foot in the building in his whole life, sets textbook-based assessment, and is of the opinion that the library’s really just there for liberal arts students to keep all their wishy-washy philosophy books in. They may find it a bit of a stretch to begin a relationship with the library with them being asked to do something out of the ordinary, especially if it wasn’t their idea. If you’ve got a super-keen library-loving type, you could float the idea, but only if you knew they had an existing assessment item which was very similar, and only if the course and assessment were being reviewed already. I’d probably shy away from informing the Dean of the business school to start with, in case you have one of those types who might see it as excellent revenue raising for the school…
• Student buy-in. This kind of live marketing campaing wouldn’t necessarily be easy to do. There aren’t copies out there on the internet to purchase and then submit with minimal changes as your own work, like there are with traditional marketing plans. It’s also tricky for those with a purely theoretical knowledgew of marketing to create an appropriate campaign for an out-of-the-ordinary corporate client like the library. Plus, it’s hard to make the library appealing for students (especially if they’ve not made much use of it during their studies so far, as many students in Business tend not to)
• Trust. A lot of librarians have a LOT of trouble letting go of their library brand. A lot of librarians might also be very nervous about what the students might come up with, and fear that it might not be quite what the library would like to say about itself. Plus, these are students, and there might be quite a difference in quality between work of a Pass grade standard and what the library expects to get – how firm is the agreement to be? Should the library be required to use the marketing campaign the students come up with if they don’t like it, or don’t think it’s good enough (or doable?)

Good points of a plan like this one include:

• New ideas – not just ideas that the library hasn’t tried, but ideas that tie in with current cultural experiencesof target library users, use the latest marketing theories, and are up-to-date with technological trends users are experiencing.
• Students are likely to be a bit more “daring” in marketing than a panel of librarians might be. (Yes, I know that’s not necessarily a good thing – but at least if the students come up with something outrageous that the library won’t go for, they can then moot something a bit less extreme and have the library much more likely to say yes)

• If graded (and given a significant enough weighting in the overall grade of the course) there’s real incentive for the students to come up with something really creative, well-supported and workable.
• Academic librarians have been complaining for years that the library doesn’t feature embedded in enough coursework. Can’t really complain of that anymore once this ideas’s in place.

If there’s any negative comment I can make about Chesnut’s project, I must say that I was a bit disappointed that the student teams could only come up with interactive signage and more graduate library workshops. And that given the student feedback, the library proceeded to come up with Task Forces (read: committees) to “investigate” the ideas the students came up with, thereby pretty much ensuring that all the ideas would be out of date before anything was done about them.

So, questions for readers (please do comment!):

• Do you think this idea was a good one? Or is it terrible for the library, the students or both?
• Was this library just cheap and nasty and should have bypassed the whole process by forking out for proper marketing advice?
• Has your library done any really out-of-the ordinary collaborations in the name of library marketing? Tell us all about it!

Creating Undergraduate Internships for non-LIS Students in Academic Libraries

Dahl, Candice, 2011, “Creating Undergraduate Internships for non-LIS  Students in Academic Libraries“, Collaborative Librarianship vol. 3 no. 2, pp. 73-78

In this paper, Candice Dahl provides a framework for implementation of a ‘library intern’ program [my choice of words, rather than Dahl's] within academic libraries, specifically aimed at non-LIS students rather than student or new-graduate librarians. She profiles the existing internship program at her library, and looks at some of the issues and problems surrounding the setup and ongoing success of the program.

This article piqued my interest because before I left work in March, a similar idea was being thrown around by my then-boss as part of a reshuffle of our library system and planning for future recruitment and liaison with the various faculties of the university. The idea was going to be that there would be graduate internships for scholars in the various fields covered by our University’s faculties, where the Library would not only provide salaried positions but would also pay the intern’s fees for studying their Masters in librarianship. It was met with a great deal of scorn and disgust – partially, I think, because it was mentioned with many other ideas which were not particularly well-regarded, some of which were put into place and were not popular. This one got tarred with much the same brush, possibly unfairly.

There were lots of wacky ideas coming out of the big office last year...

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I think it’s actually a very good idea. And I’m going to make myself very unpopular by saying this – but I think for academic librarianship it might actually become more than just a good idea and perhaps move into the “necessary for survival” column, for a number of reasons:

• Graduates from faculties and schools outside LIS know stuff. Your average chemistry 3rd-year knows far, far more about chemistry than a librarian armed with the Kirtk-Othmer encyclopedia ever will. Even if said librarian’s been brandishing said encyclopedia for 40+ years. Sorry, but it’s true.
• Most LIS graduates come from Arts and Social Science backgrounds. And try as we might, it’s very difficult to get an in-depth knowledge of things like Law, Medicine, Science, Engineering without disciplinary education.
• Following on from this – most librarians like librarianship. They signed up to be librarians – if they’d wanted to do Law or Medicine they’d have become lawyers or doctors. They are happy to dip into the disciplinary content of a given field enough to be able to talk the talk, and can develop over time an understanding of key sub-topics, authors and resources within the field, but all this is done without an in-depth knowledge of the subject itself, and thus, I would argue, no real feel for what the scholar in said field needs.
• Yes, I know the argument exists that “but the Chemist doesn’t know anything about Modern German History, so they won’t care about questions about Modern German History at the library desk, and they won’t help the students properly.” This might seem harsh, but students are going to the internet way before they’re going to the library desk, and if their question is complex enough that they can’t find their answer through basic online research, they need a subject specialist. Either their lecturer/tutor, or a subject specialist library researcher. So rather than expecting the Chemist to be a generalist (as librarians currently are) maybe we hire a Historian too.
• That’s not to say we need an Organic Chemist, Metallurgical Chemist, Inorganic Chemist, Toxicological Chemist, Ancient Historian, Medieval Historian, Modern Historian and Historiographer. I believe that there can be some degree of generalisation. But even an Organic Chemist will know more about inorganic chemistry, or at least where to look for information on organic chemistry, better than a historian might.
• It’s not all about answering reference questions. Increasingly, the academic librarian has to be a specialist in resource selection, data curatorship, publication avenues and multi-repurposing of information through different projects and media. It’s hard to do all of that without knowing how someone in that discipline thinks, what their major requirements, influences and triggers are.

One of the major obstacles in all this is getting a non-LIS student to intern at the library, let alone ever consider making a career out of it. Dahl talks about how identifying enticing incentives for students to intern at the library can be tricky (once you get past offering course credit, that is). The problem compounds when you look at creation of graduate posts:

• Say, for example, I’m a law student, staring down the barrel of graduation. I could take a library internship, do more study and earn $50k a year. Or hey, I’m now a lawyer, and if I can get a job, I’m probably earning $80k first year out. And in ten years’ time, I’ll have probably tripled that per annum, whereas I’ll probably still be on $55-60k in the library. So if I’m smart enough to get a job as a lawyer, I will, simple as that.
• Substitute any other profession which earns you more than librarianship (read: pretty much anything) and it’ll be exactly the same story.

Ever heard the old maxim “those who can, do – those who can’t, teach”? It’ll be pretty much like that - with not much incentive for high achievers to select a library internship and library career path, the library ends up with either no candidates from the field, or second-rate ones (though you could argue that this isn’t much different from the way it is now.)

Plus, then there'd be lots of out-of-work librarians... and what would they do now Borders has closed?

I would have liked to see Dahl provide a bit more of a critique of how these internships ended up being of benefit – to the student, for starters, but more importantly to the library. Why is it useful to have non-LIS students dip their toes into the librarianship pool?It’d be cool to see in a couple of years whether any of those interns followed a library path. It’d be even cooler to take it wider than just the English department, into one of those faculties where Librarian wouldn’t be the first-round draft pick in terms of career options, to see if the internship did anything to attract the intern to continue in libraries longer-term.

So, questions for readers (please do comment!):

• Have you got an internship program at your library? How does it work? Where is it headed?
• Is it fair to librarians to think, in terms of future workforce planning, “disciplinarian then librarian” rather than the other way round, as we currently do? Or does that devalue the profession?
• What would attract high-paying professional disciplines to elect to take their knowledge down a Library path instead?
• Is this whole idea just crazy? Is internship for students workable, but for graduates impossible?

Welcome!

Just a quick post to explain what’s going to happen here.

I’m going to, on a weekly basis, read a journal article, provide some commentary and open up for discussion. The nuts and bolts of this will be:

• Open access journals only.
• I’ll be contacting the authors to let them know I critically reviewed their article.
• At this stage I’m not taking requests to review.
• Articles will come from all sectors of librarianship, but since I’ve got a Uni background there might be a bias towards that.
• There’ll be a Reader’s Question every week for comment, which will come from the article review.

That’s it! First review to follow!