June 27th, 2009 Brian Herzog
This week’s reference question is one of my own. I use Bloglines to read rss feeds, and a couple weeks ago they changed their interface.
I didn’t like the changes, so I used their Contact Form to express this and ask if there was an option to change it back. This was two weeks ago, and I still haven’t gotten a reply.
Then it occurred to me that perhaps Bloglines used Twitter, and maybe I could ask them that way. I found an @bloglines user, but even though he’s using the Bloglines logo, he indicates it’s not an official Bloglines account.
I asked him my question anyway (noticing he was fielding the exact same question a lot lately), and got a reply in 5 hours. And best of all, his suggestion worked perfectly, and now I’m back to using Bloglines happily, the way that suits me best.
But this experience got me thinking. It’s easy for organizations to let email messages slide, because only that one person knows they sent it in. But Twitter is public, and if someone is questioning or complaining, ignoring it won’t make it go away.
Unofficial or not, @bloglines did exactly what I would have expected an organization to do - respond quickly and helpfully.
This is what librarians do, and it reminded me of Kate’s post about their library suggestion box. I like that she’s publicly displaying suggestions and answers, because in this case, one-to-many communication seems better than one-to-one.
So I thought, why not encourage patrons to use Twitter as a suggestion box? Being public, the library has to address patrons’ concerns, but it also means all patrons can benefit from the answer, rather than just one.
I know a public forum isn’t appropriate for every issue, and anonymity can be necessary, so I think traditional suggestion boxes (whether physical or online form) are still useful. But I bet there are some libraries already doing this very thing. I know I came late to Twitter, but it really is turning out to be a very useful tool after all.
Tags: bloglines, box, customer service, libraries, Library, public, Reference Question, Service, suggestion, suggestions, twitter See Also
Posted under Library, Marketing, Reference Question, Service | 6 Comments »
March 26th, 2009 Brian Herzog
I was shopping with a friend in the L.L. Bean store in Freeport, Maine, and ended up in a check-out line.
It was a nice Saturday afternoon, the store was crowded, and the lines at the registers were long. But L.L. Bean is one of those companies that is totally focused on customer service, and they were doing something I’ve never seen before (granted, I don’t get out much, and I avoid shopping whenever possible, but still, this was cool).
In addition to the cashiers at the registers, there was also another employee walking up and down the check-out line with a portable scanner and barcode printer. He scanned each item a customer had, and then printed out a receipt with a barcode. When the customer got to the cash register, the cashier just scanned that one barcode, instead of fiddling around scanning each item’s barcode.
It was amazing how much faster the line moved, and I got to wondering if something like this could be employed in libraries.
Of course, many staff and patrons enjoy the informal small talk while the books are being checked out, and this would all but eliminate that. And self-check machines are there for patrons who are in a hurry. But still, I was impressed with the way L.L. Bean identified and launched such a simple service that had such a large and positive impact on the shopping experience.
Maybe we could at least get the moms with the foot-tall stack of picture books to pre-scan their items before they get to the Circulation Desk.
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Posted under Service | 4 Comments »
December 16th, 2008 Brian Herzog
Since the outages caused by the ice storm on Thursday, my library has been slowly reestablishing our affected services. First back up was our power and heat and catalog (day two), then wireless internet (day three), then internet to the public workstations (day four).
This progressive-improvement situation made for a good quote. When asked by a staff person if things were working again, the response was:
Everything is working, but we’re still working on making it patron-proof again.
It made perfect sense in context, but when I thought about it later, it sounded both funny and counter-intuitive.
Recovering from an unintended power outage really draws a stark line between having something work, and having something work the way we want it to. Just having a computer that turns on isn’t good enough - ours also need to automatically log in, track time, connect to printers and the internet, and protect the user’s privacy and data. And ideally, do all this without intervention from the user.
On the surface, the answer above might sound like our goal was keep the computers safe from the public. The goal is actually to make sure the public needs to do as little as possible to use our computers (making sure they can do no harm is a side effect).
Tags: computer, computers, ice, libraries, Library, outage, outages, public, Service, services, storm, tech, Technology See Also
Posted under Library, Technology | No Comments »
November 13th, 2008 Brian Herzog
A little while ago, I got the idea to visually represent the official relationships that exist around a public library. Turns out, it was more involved than I thought, and the resulting figure wasn’t what I initially conceived.
This came about during a conference I attended. I was thinking about library services, and why some good ideas get implemented while others don’t, and why libraries offer some things that seem to be of no use to anyone. This started me down the path of getting to the root of “why” and “how,” which I came to refer to as “What is Necessary” and “What is Possible.”
The figure shown here is what I came up with (and evidence of my mad graphic design skills). The center triangle are the relationships between the public library (in blue, in the middle), the people we serve (on the top) and the people who serve us (on the bottom). The two big arrows on either side are the flow of needs and reality - somewhere in the middle the public library is trying to reconcile the two.
What is Necessary
Reading from the top down, the needs of our patrons are basically what drives everything that goes on in a library. Be it helping kids with homework, finding recipes, or preserving historical information for future generations, the needs of our patrons are What is Necessary for the library to provide.
To meet these needs, we can fall back on various groups that are in place to support the library (bottom of the triangle):
- if we need funding, we can request it from the various funding sources (state, local, Friends, etc.)
- if we need to alter library policy, we go to the Trustees
- if we need an improvement to the catalog or interlibrary loan service, we bring that up with the library network
- if we don’t know how to deliver a particular service, we should be able to look to the wider library world of the State Library or various library associations for guidance
All of these groups are in place to serve the staff of a public library. Ideally, we tell them what we need in order to meet the requirements of our patrons, and they provide it.
What is Possible
But of course, we’re not just handed everything we ask for:
- the realities of local and state funding place limits on our budget
- the wisdom of our Trustees keep library services in line with community values
- being part of a library network means my public library is one voice among many other cooperating libraries
- State Libraries and library associations can’t always help, or aren’t up-to-date with the latest software, vendors or services
It is the role of the library to take what we can get, and do the best we can with it to meet the needs of our patrons. Sometimes this means offering limited or abridged services, or services that sort of do what we want, but aren’t ideal (i.e., the current state of downloadable audiobooks). But even by working within the constraints placed on us by the groups that support us, we should always strive to provide patrons with services tailored to meet their needs.
And then patrons tell us what their new needs are, and we go back down the chain, and the cycle continues.
The Public Library
In this model, the library is at the center of everything (leave it to a librarian to develop a bibliocentric view of life). I represented the public library on the triangle as both a single entity and also individual parts (I know libraries are more complex than this, but I was going for the basics). I did this because I see the same type of relationship structure within the library as without:
- the frontline desk staff works with patrons, so they often know best how effective library services are
- administration and support staff are consulted to change policies or procedures, and can be tasked with finding an appropriate tool to address a need
- the IT staff are generally the people who enforce reality, in terms of what is technically possible within the limits of the library
Regardless of how a need is first identified, it usually flows around these relationships until it is either implemented or abandoned.
So, What’s the Point?
Not that any of this is rocket science, or isn’t discernible by anyone else that works in a library. I think I did this as an exercise to illustrate patron-centricness. When it comes to library services, everything we offer should be addressing a need from “up the chain.” Offering services just because we can, or because it’s something being pushed on us from “below,” doesn’t justify that service. If a service doesn’t address a patron need, then should we really be offering it?
Tags: hierarchy, libraries, Library, patron, patrons, public, relationships, Service, services, what is necessary, what is possible See Also
Posted under Library, Service | 1 Comment »
October 16th, 2008 Brian Herzog
I hope everyone enjoyed Work Like a Patron Day, and found a way to make using the library easier for your patrons.
I didn’t get to spend as much time as I had hoped, but I did notice a few things:
- We need more scrap paper at the workstations
- We need to clean up the litter and leaves and sticks and other debris around the front steps
- We should rename our wireless network from “CPL-g” to something an uninitiated patron will recognize and feel safe with
- It turns out that staff congregating and chatting at service desks is every bit as distracting as patrons on cell phones
But what struck me the most wasn’t what I noticed, but what kinds of things I noticed. I mean, I already know that the patron catalog interface needs improvement, and that not everyone understands how to log on to a computer or where the photocopier is.
Everything I noticed yesterday were little things. Even though I’m among the public computers every day, and we replenish them with scrap paper when we see them empty, if you’re a patron sitting there and there is no paper, it doesn’t help that staff put some there that morning. It’s not there now. And the junk around the front door is easy to miss when you’ve got on the blinders of familiarity - it’s always there, so I stopped noticing it. But when you do notice it, it looks kind of bad.
So in addition to the original list, I’m also going to make a point of looking for the subtle things, like:
- Is there a glare on computers by the windows at certain parts of the day?
- Is it too hot/cold in here?
- Does it stink in here?
- How easy is the phone menu system to navigate?
Even if I can’t change them, staff being aware of them is a good thing, because I’m sure our patrons are.
So thank you to everyone who supported and participated in the day. I got lots of emails and saw many posts and comments about it, which is great. In fact, I only saw one negative comment about it. It astounds me that someone who writes for Library Journal would criticize the idea of making the library a better place, but there you go.
Be sure to remember this day next year, too. More information is available on
http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=Work_Like_A_Patron_Day and http://www.flickr.com/groups/worklikeapatronday.
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Posted under Library, Service | 1 Comment »
