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Category: Services

Three Cheers for Collaboration!

Published by Iris on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

One of the greatest things about working where I do is the way I get to work with people from our IT department. Or rather, it’s the way that the idea of working with the IT department isn’t a big deal. I absolutely take it for granted that we have a combined service point (which we’ve named Research/IT… yeah, “research it”…) instead of a reference desk. I think nothing of calling down to Matt on the web team if I need something from our content management system that either isn’t there yet, or that is there but I can’t figure out. In any given week, it’s entirely possible that I’ll spend more time working on projects with IT people than I will with people from other departments in the library.

Well, today we had a half-day retreat for all library staff, all IT staff, the archivist, and the slide librarian. The first hour was filled with three- to five-minute descriptions of projects we’ve done in the last year that were collaborative across our department. May I say “Wow”? We’ve done everything from design and implement a new icon set for the different material types in our catalog, to planning for a new concept of data services that will provide much needed support for all the classes that need to find, manipulate, and analyze data sets.

There’s still room for improvement, but if there weren’t life would be boring. So for the next part of the retreat we broke into groups to talk about the future. What do we want to improve? Well it’s no surprise that we want to have a better handle on who knows what so that we can tap expertise whenever possible. We also want to think of ways to improve communication so that we aren’t so dependent on vast quantities email. We’d also like to develop of system of periodic short (half-hour or 45-minute) sessions of presentations and/or discussions focused on what we do, what we think about, projects we’re working on together, projects we’re working on separately, and anything else of interest. Oh, and they would be open to the entire campus. The faculty have this in place already via our amazing Learning and Teaching Center, but we’d like periodic sessions produced by us as well.

I’m so pumped!

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Being a Patron

Published by Iris on Saturday, July 22nd, 2006

Note: If the title sounds an awful lot like titles of much more thoughtful and useful articles you’ve read in the last couple of days, it is purely … um … thievery. But the title fits.

I went to my local public library this week, as I do quite often. It’s a small library, but they have a decent collection of books and quite a good collection of videos, dvds, and audio books (good for those long drives to other towns, through corn fields, which still mess with this city girl’s head). I had just gotten back from the wedding and family reunion week, and I knew I had a book on tape checked out (Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, part 2 of 3), but I thought it was due the next week. It wasn’t. It was already three days overdue.

“Did you bring back “Atlas Shrugged” today?” asked the circulation lady.

“No,” I replied, still wondering why she’d want me to bring back a book that was due next week.

“Oh, because its a little overdue, but let me just renew it for you,” the circulation lady say, without any hesitation at all.

Just like that, she renewed my overdue book. It made my day. Kudos to the Northfield Public Library for putting customer service over ILS messages. (And btw, she did the same thing for the three overdue videos of the family in front of me.)

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Customer service gone wrong

Published by Iris on Monday, April 17th, 2006

While we’re on the topic of customer service, take a look at this post from Library Garden:

Library Garden: On underwear, beanies, and other fashion statements…

I’ve seen some pretty effective ways to reduce younger clientele (such as when the local coffee shop I worked at during graduate school closed its doors at the late, late hour of 7:00 every night, 3:00 on weekends… SO stupid), but this is one of the most creative ways I’ve come across recently.

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Unexpected customer service

Published by Iris on Monday, April 17th, 2006

Last Friday, my best friend couldn’t get her car to run. We both worked for a couple of hours calling, searching the web while waiting on hold, talking to service stations, and searching the web some more to find a place that could service her little asian car, and then to find a tow service that wouldn’t cost her the equivalent of a week’s salary. Finally, she headed out to her car to wait for the towing service while I started the hunt-and-call process for a rental car so that she could get to work (the place that could fix her car didn’t do the loaner thing). Well, we found a place that not only didn’t break the bank, but also picked up their customers and dropped them off for free! What a deal!

But so far, that wasn’t customer service; it was just good business. The customer service comes in later, after her car is fixed and she’s trying to figure out how to time things so that she can drive her rental to the rental company (35 miles south), get a ride back home, take a cab to the service station (3 miles south of home), and then drive to work (50 miles north) all between the time the rental place opens (8:00) and the time she has to be at work (9:00). But when she called the rental place to ask when they opened, the guy on the other end did just what we’re taught to do in a reference interview. He recognized this as a “compromised” information need, and went questing for the real need. And when he found out that she had this time crunch, he offered to have her just drive the rental to the service station and give him a call. He’d pick up the rental from the service station… no extra charge. Not only did this completely make my friend’s day, but it also ensured that she and everyone she knows has a warm and fuzzy feeling for rental places in general and this company in particular.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could figure out how to make this happen in the library world? I’ve been struck by a few posts recently in the biblioblogosphere that have dealt with this issue of customer service, especially this post from Library Garden about Nordstrom’s culture of serving the customer without being tied to rules and regulations. (It was with this in mind that I [gasp] allowed a student to check out a reference book last week.)

Why can’t we offer to photocopy articles and run them to our “customers” when they call to see if we subscribe the journal housing a particular article? For that matter, we could even scan and email articles that aren’t available online.

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