Connecting Librarian

In the process of completing this largish (for me) project at work, I thought it would be good to get down in some logical order, a bit about the project, what we learned, what was hard/easy and what we would change.  It will take more than one post to get it all down, so I appreciate your patience as I get this serial out into the cloud.

Off to a cautious beginning in November 08, culminating in the launch in the last week of May 09, my partner in crime and manager at work - Linda and myself have built our new library website, using Drupal - an open source content management system.

First off, some quick explanations.  Drupal is a content management system (CMS) - a software package that enables the user “to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website.” (Drupal 2009)  CMS’s can be used to organise many different types of digital content, but ours was to be used for the library website.  Drupal is also open source, which means the software is free and there are many modules which can be used with it, which have been developed by the programming community around the world.

But let’s start back at the beginning.  Our library website was long past due for an overhaul.  It needed a new look and a bit of content reorganisation.  Some of the dross needed to go and we needed a bit more glam.  The website hadn’t had any more than a minor tweak and small additions since 2005 - a long time in web terms.

We had been looking to use a vendor product which would enable us to have a combined OPAC and website, but unfortunately that didn’t work out as hoped and so we had another look at our options.  We narrowed them down to two, either in-house development using a content management system or purchasing an out of the box CMS.  It was agreed that it would be done in-house and Linda and I began looking at our options for open source CMS’s.

There were many options there also, but again we narrowed our choices down to two - Drupal and Joomla.  Both had a lot going for them - including compatibility with Web 2.0 tools, WYSIWYG functionality and much more. We opted to go with Drupal, mainly because it had a large library user base in the US which we could use for inspiration and help and for the access to local support from our ISP. It didn’t hurt that my husband, a computer programmer was also using it to develop a website.

So having made the decision in November 08, it was time to get started.  We developed a timeline of learning about Drupal, developing the new website and moving the content over.  As with many projects, the plan was revised a few times and although the project never worked the way it was planned in terms of what activities happened when, we were pretty much right on the dot for the timing of it all.

Our next step was to work with our ISP - Vicnet, to get Drupal installed and ready for us to start building the new website.  They were incredibly supportive and helpful throughout the whole process and got us out of a couple of interesting situations which could have been very problematic.  Initially, we had at the software installed on our part of one of their webservers, but when we needed a more current version of PHP to make things happen, it moved to one of their development servers.

And we were off and running.  Problem now was - how do we use this thing?  It was installed for us, we had IP access and log-in details, but very little clue about how to work with this software.  The clue that I did have came from working with the blogging software Word Press, on both my blog and Libraries Interact - thank goodness for that experience alone!

So we did what all clever librarians do in these situations, we looked for resources to help us learn about this wonderful new toy we had to play with. This ended up being mostly a decent book with great instructions on how to do various tasks, a great series of online videos and Drupal forum posts.

That’s enough for this post.  Stay tuned for the next enthralling episode, where we really get down to the nitty gritty of building the website.

With Library Week next week and a few other things happening, I have been thinking about my profession, what led me to come to this place and how what I do fits with who I am.

I am a librarian.  I recommend you check out Librarian Idol’s recent post The Great I AM….. Andrew manages to express succintly how I feel about that. (thanks Andrew)

I decided that I wanted to be  librarian in Grade 6.  We had a great librarian at my school, who made the library fun and got me interested in more than reading, which I was already more than interested in.

Going through high school I think my teachers thought it unusual for anyone to be so dedicated to knowing what they wanted to do. They encouraged me to consider other options, one assessment required me to investigate another - my choice?  Marine Biologist.  How further apart can you get.

I never doubted that a librarian was what I was going to be. I was accepted into the course of my choice on first offers and was happy doing it.  All confirmed what I had decided when I was 11.  I was happiest with reference related subjects and that has held up for the 23 years since I graduated.

I am a born reference librarian.  Anyone asks a question and I have to answer it, even if its a retrospective one. If there is a problem that needs to be solved that interests me, I need to find a solution. As a librarian, there have been a lot of such problems.   

If you’re on Facebook, I recommend you try out their What kind of librarian are you application.  Of course it came out with me being a reference librarian. I seem to know myself reasonably well by now.

What it said about me was: ” Reference Librarian” - You are a human search engine who always wins Trivial Pursuit. Logical, direct and clever, you’ll spend days tracking down bits of information, even though the patron who requested it has long since moved on. If you can stop beginning all of your sentences with “Well, actually” or “I’ve always found that…”, your co-workers will start talking to you again. Primary sources and well-structured databases make you quiver with excitement, and you probably stand the best chance of surviving Armageddon due to the breadth of knowledge tucked away among your little gray cells.“  For those of you who know me - stop laughing!

Well its not entirely true, I’ve moved on from pure information seeking for patron’s sakes (but still an entirely consuming personal passion, lol), onto the joy that the internet and bringing it to and using it for the benefit of our users.

Stepping back in time once again. (cue up music and shimmering screen as we go back - picture is in colour though, I’m not THAT old).  In year 10 I did my work experience at a public library and didn’t think much of it. Not that it put me off being a librarian - I knew it could be better. However, it had me thinking that when I qualified, that I would work in a school or special library, because it would give me the variety I wanted. As such, I did my course placements in a school library and a special library.  I enjoyed both those experiences and it seemed to confirm my chosen direction.

However, it was not to be.  Whatever you believe in, God, fate, coincidence and my own fickle mind took me to where I never expected to go.  I started applying for jobs towards the end of my final semester at Uni. One such job, was in a public library. I ignored it the first week I saw it, but when I saw it again the following week, for reasons unknown even to me after all this time,  I applied.  Was delighted to get an interview and awestruck when I got the job. Even moreso when reviewing my application letter later and saw the amount of typing errors still in the letter, even after the liberal use of correction fluid. (PCs weren’t around at that point - it was the good old portable typewriter).

When I first started work, there was an Apple IIc and an Apple IIe computer available for staff use only.  I had never seen anything other than mainframes and dumb terminals, so they were totally new to me.  But being a curious person (good librarian trait) and not scared to play (another good trait), I started learning and within 6 months, was the person everyone came to for help with them.

How things have changed since that day nearly 24 years ago.

So on reflection, what about me personally, has helped make me a good librarian. I’ve mentioned some of those things already, but here they are in list form:

• curiousity
• desire to learn
• problem-solver
• information seeker
• question answerer
• like to make people happy (sometimes not such a good thing)
• not afraid of new things
• like to experiment
• like to share what I learn
• persistent and determined

And many more.  They have all helped me to do a good job over the years and have helped me to be an ever improving librarian who loves what she does.

So what’s your story?  What about you makes you a good librarian? Although Library Week is usually about promoting libraries to our communities, lets celebrate Library Week for ourselves as well by reaffirming our librarian-ness and being proud to say I am a librarian.

There have been a lot of stories going around the last few months, about the future of newspapers and how they are in jeopardy because of the Net. (great links and summary of key articles at Rosen’s Flying Seminar in the Future of News) I’ll refer to some of those, whilst giving a personal perspective and some insight from working with our users and those resources.

I guess my thoughts began even before I saw the Pew Research Center for the People & The Press report from December 2008. The Internet Overtakes Newspapers As News Outlet released survey findings that showed the Internet bypassed all other forms of media, excepting TV, as a source for both national and international news.

Since then, there have been many big stories from the US mainly, about newspapers closing down or downsizing, as their sales slide down.  That’s not to say that people aren’t interested in news, they are just finding it in different ways.

During the February 09 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, I was on the Herald-Sun newspaper website several times a day, looking for the latest information and images from the disaster.  That was also the place I went to when we experienced two earth tremors within a few weeks of each in March 09.  I found that besides Twitter (which by the way, the Herald-Sun was also monitoring), that this was the quickest source to pick up the news.

Great for the paper, that people are turning to them online to read that up-to-date content, now they just have to try and make money out of it, so that they can keep providing that content.  What model they will take up is unknown as yet, but it will have to be one that doesn’t scare people aware from using their content, ala New York Times with their paid subs.

Interestingly though, there is a definite interest in the physical act of reading a newspaper, but in an online environment.  A number of years ago, my library subscribed to an online database that enabled the reader to read the newspaper online looking like the actual paper itself. So when you get the newspaper on screen, it looks exactly like the paper copy.  You click on the bottom corner and can turn the page and can continue doing so, from front to back and to front again.  Alternatively, you can skip to particular pages or sections as you like.

We subscribed to that database initially to give our users access to international newspapers, so that local residents could read their home country newspaper, in the language of its origin.  No waiting for airmail deliveries etc, you could read it within a day of its publication (allowing for time differences of course). What has happened in the last year, is that our users are using it to access our major daily newspapers and reading them online as they would physically.  Use of that database has increased exponentially in that time and the vast majority of that use is around the major dailies.

On the otherhand, use of the databases that indexes the same newspapers, the one that students use a lot for assignments etc, has remained fairly static in comparison.

Which brings us to the local level. Our local newspapers have had online presences for a while, but no archive to speak of.  One of our local newspaper chains is now available through a newspaper database, but only beginning this year.  After nearly 10 years of archives of our major dailies, this is long overdue.  But with the disappearance of local papers in the US, I wonder how long our local papers will remain with us and whether this is too little too late.

And if it is, what will happen to local news.  Again the US gives some idea of direction with new Web start-ups looking to fill that gap. Hyperlocal web sites deliver news without newspapers ironically appears in the New York Times.  Go check it out and then think about where your local news will come from if the newspapers themselves disappear.  Is this a gap that the public library can step into and if so, how?

Interestingly, I do still sometimes read the physical newspaper, but only if it happens to be in front of me, I don’t go to seek it out.  With the major dailies, its usually to acquaint myself with the important (or on slow news days, not so important) topics of current interest, but more importantly, to catch up on the comics and the sports I am interested in.   I also read my local papers (we get 3), mainly for things of personal interest or that of my family, or that relate to my local area or promote the library.

Do you still read the physical newspaper, local, major daily or national,  or do you prefer to do all your news seeking online?  Is the format you use dependent on whether you browse or particularly seek, like me?  Would love to hear your habits and thoughts as we all might have to change them in coming years.

Most of us would have heard of Movers and Shakers, the Library Journal’s annual awards to library staff who have had a significant impact in the profession.  I have posted here on it and there have been several posts at Libraries Interact when the winners are announced each year.  The winners are worthy recipients and inspiring.

However, there are many librarians out there who are just as inspiring and worthy who have not received that accolade, some because it has been US based (only changed this year) and some because they haven’t been nominated.

Now comes the Library Society of the World, a worthy institution in its own right, to address this severe oversight.  They have introduced the Shovers and Makers Awards.  From the website:

… at the Library Society of the World, we can’t help but wonder about everyone else in libraryland. While the Movers and Shakers are moving and shaking, what are the rest of us doing? Standing still? Surely not.

So we have come up with our own award that we see as a complement to M&S. Introducing Library Society of the World’s Shovers and Makers.

And the real kicker and most fun about it is:

And there is only one way to become a Shover and Maker: declare yourself one.

So I have.  You can check out my self-nominated entry and acceptance (its been published on the Shovers and Makers website) at http://www.shoversandmakers.net/2009/michelle-mclean.

I highly recommend that you go and check out the other worthy Shover and Maker recipients and consider nominating yourself.  I would probably nominate a fair few of you, but I’m not allowed to.

It’s March 24th, making it Ada Lovelace Day and in memory of Ada - a woman who is considered to be the first programmer, I and many others have pledged to write about a woman in technology who inspires me.  Before I do, here’s some more about this day.

Ada Lovelace Day “is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology”.  I came across it on Facebook, where pledges from interested people were being sought to participate in what will hopefully be an annual event.  I say hopefully, because although I have chosen my inspiring woman for this year, I have others that I would like to write about in future years.  I made my pledge, so here goes.

My inspiring woman in technology is Helene Blowers, currently Digital Strategy Director for the Columbus Metropolitan Library, presenter, blogger at Library Bytes, creator of the Learning 2.0 program and 2007 Library Journal Mover and Shaker.

If that paragraph alone is not enough to show you how much she inspires me, then I’ll give you some more.  I have been fortunate enough to be able to spend time with Helene on 3 separate occasions, once at her former library - the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County and twice here in Australia when she came out to present at various events.  I consider myself fortunate to not only be inspired by her, but also to be able to call her my friend.

She is inspiring because she is creative, innovative (with Learning 2.0 only the beginning), sharing (Learning 2.0 is shared with all libraries under a Creative Commons licence) and dedicated to advancing the profession and those of us in it (her presenting and writing are just two areas in which she does that). She looks at the way technology and library users are moving and then seeks to find ways in which libraries can lever that to meet the needs of our communities.  She takes risks, tries things out and moves forward with the lessons learned from each one.  She then shares those experiences and challenges us to do the same for our own developing communities.  She believes in the place of libraries in those communities, both now and way into the future.

On top of that, she is a dedicated mother who manages being there for her family as well as working fulll-time, has managed a relocation to another state and the continues to manage the many requests she gets to present at seminars, conferences and more, both in her US home and around the world.  She is generous with her time, her expertise and her experiences.  For all these reasons and many more, I am proud to write this post about her for the first Ada Lovelace Day. And to Helene, thanks for all that you have given to me and to the profession, I really appreciate it.

However, I also want to acknowledge some other women friends who are doing inspiring things with technology and libraries and who I would love to write about on Ada Lovelace Day in future years.  So here’s to you also Kathryn, Con, Fiona and Peta.  They, along with me and our great male partners in crime, Corey, Morgan and Snail, make up the team that write the Libraries Interact blog.  They all inspire me on a regular basis and for that guys, I give you my thanks.

I encourage you to read all their blogs, as well as Libraries Interact, to find out all the great stuff that is happening with technology and libraries in Australia.

In the meantime, have a Ada Lovelace Day!

I was reading an article not so long ago - How Google is making us smarter - which in turn was almost looking to counter a previous article - Is Google making us stupid? You can check out either or both at your leisure, but the former got me thinking.

In How Google is making us smarter, the author Carl Zimmer talks about the extended mind. This concept was first raised in 1998 by two philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers (an Aussie).  In their essay “The Extended Mind” they posed the question “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” In it they posited that someone who keeps something in their memory and someone who keeps the information stored elsewhere, but at hand, (eg. on computer, in a notebook etc), are the same.  The external source that the individual uses to hold information is part of their extended mind.  Interesting viewpoint right?

So how does that relate to Librarians and evolution?  Librarians are phenomenal miners of information. We can find information on a vast array of topics and when we do, we somehow take note of the content itself or where it can be found.  Librarians have already taken the idea of the extended mind way beyond the boundary of where I am sure Clark and Chalmers imagined it would be.  How many times have friends and family been amazed at you knowing some amazing details, or being able to find out something in a very short time and with minimal difficulty. (I am notorious for finding the answers to retrospective questions - born curious and therefore a born reference librarian)

The article goes on further to comment about how humans are proving to be very good at merging mind and machine.  Look at how we drive cars - our perception of distance adjusts to the edge of the car, as it becomes an extension of ourselves.  Clark and Chalmers also argue that there is further evidence, in the form of study results that prove that our minds are constantly seeking to extend themselves.

If that is the case, then aren’t librarians at the forefront of that extension? And if that’s how humanity will continue to grow and develop, then as we are already out there on the cutting edge, doesn’t that make the librarian the next step for many on the evolutionary road?

Can you imagine it?  Evolution leads to a superhuman being - the librarian!  Gotta love the image.

Its been well over a week since I got back from Aurora and it will take a whole lot longer before I can say that I have gotten my head around it all.

I can’t tell you all about what happened there.  No point really, the old cliche really does apply here - ‘you had to be there…..’  Not only that, but at lot of what you get out of it is very individual.  Everyone has a different experience.  However, I will give you an idea of the sorts of things we did, but mainly I’ll write about what I got out of it and being a task type person, what I’m planning to do with what I got out of it.

We did a lot of learning. Learnt a lot about myself and about others and how to work with them. Learnt a lot about strategies and getting your point across to decision makers.  Learnt about getting the best out of a group of people and how to develop a team to achieve that. Learnt that climbing mountains is hard work and that cricket is not necessarily the game we see played so professionally on TV.  Learnt that to do all this is confronting, exhausting, challenging, inspiring, motivating and scary and requires a dedication to your profession that goes beyond your current position description.  And that’s just what I can think of from the top of my head at the moment.

Also learnt that my thinking on where I am and where I’m going professionally was pretty much on the mark, which was very satisfying. I also learnt however, that although I achieve much on a regular basis, I can do more. I also was reminded of a lesson that my son taught me, that being that my priority is not necessarily the first one. And that lesson equally applies to my work as well as my family.

I learnt about presenting business cases, about being open with a group of people in an amazing environment. I learnt about change management and change styles and discovered that I wasn’t always what I thought I was - an interesting exploration into self. I learnt about how to really look at the library environment, learnt a lot about SWOT analyses, took a trip into the big picture of our profession, talked vision, examined risk-taking, confidence and putting yourself out there and much more.

So what have I come away with.  First off I guess is the true realisation that we are a profession. And if that is truly the way of it, then I have to act professionally.  So my first forays into personal change are to get my act together as a professional.  I am starting to get some more ‘business-like’ clothes and think about my appearance a bit more - I’ve finally started the diet again, too much weight put on, some of it from the awesome food we had at Aurora, but also how I look when I go to work.

I have also taken the first step in refocusing myself at work and looking at how what I does fits in with my library’s goals and plans.  I guess its all about me becoming a better follower, before I can become a good leader. I am also starting to look at visioning for my library in the work that I do and setting some concrete goals for the virtual services for which I am jointly responsible. I have asked (and had accepted) one of my senior managers to act as mentor for me in this process.  And finally, I am preparing myself and my family for me to go back to full-time work next year, only with my family’s blessing however, after 9 years of working part-time.

A couple of staff members asked me today whether Aurora had changed me. I said to them that it hadn’t - what it had done was to refocus me and motivate me to do more - go higher I guess. Ultimately I guess that means I will change, but that’s the environment we live and work in, so I’m happy for that to happen.

For those of you who have heard rumours about Aurora, yes it did make me cry, but not everyone did. I never did discover the secret handshake and I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to make the most of their career as a librarian - not only for yourselves, but also for our amazing profession.

Day 1 was great, but Day 2 was just as good.

Social media & Library Marketing

The strength of our libraries is our unique brand - which is the specific communities we each serve.  Mass marketing is no longer the key, it is now niche marketing. Even our top Australian TV shows only reach about 5% of the population.

The public visiting public libraries is a choice, not a requirement - really think about what that means.

Marketing is a requirement for libraries, but can be done in new and amazingly engaging ways through Web 2.0.  Examples included a Day in the life of Allen County - Allen County Public Library, Paint the town Read - PLCMC, Love New Jersey Libraries, Storypalooza - Gail Borden Public Library and many more.  We shouldn’t be worried about the sustainability of such programs, after all the technology is changing so fast. We should be more concerned about community needs - use short bursts to get our communities aware of their library.

Create an engagement calendar. Use regular events and holidays to create activities, using free online tools, such as image generators.

8 Steps to Marketing 2.0:

1. Educate - learn about social media
2. Experience - participate and join in the conversation
3. Envision - develop a 2.0 marketing plan
4. Engage - create social celebrations
5. Enable - help your library brand & content travel
6. Expand - play with multimedia
7. Explore - learn as you go & track success
8. Experiment, experiment, experiment

And to top it all off: “The best way to get your customers to market your brand is to allow them to promote (the library) by marketing themselves!”

2.0 Innovations: Passions to Practices

We need to be looking for reasons to change, not excuses for not changing.

Efficiency evolution - improving on what already exists - libraries are good at this. Evolutionary evolution - creating something new and distinctly better. Revolutionary evolution - radically changes business and culture.  Libraries are great at the first and have a long way to go before they are anywhere near implementing the others.

Four elements of innovation: creativity, strategy, implementation and profitability.  Innovation in libraries usually fails at the strategy - lack of buy-in being one of the unbreachable barriers reached there.

Innovative ideas come from focussing on quantity - not quality, collecting everything, getting out of the comfort zone and adding constraints to your thinking.

However, it can be not so much the ideas you need to focus on, but how to move those ideas through the organisation.

• Sell it - tie it to your mission and vision statements
• Create alliances - build relationships that will give you support
• Don’t ask for permission - either ask for forgiveness where the risk is all yours, or ask for support and share the risk
• Sell your vision personally - if you have to produce a report, follow it up personally - you can’t sell a vision on a piece of paper
• Find a champion - if not a supervisor, find a mentor - even if they are outside your line of authority

Implementation requires time, resources and scope. If there is a problem here, you need to revisit the strategy. The profitability comes with how the idea is enacted within your organisation.

Change is about leadership - shouldering it yourself. Change begins with me, leadership is taking the responsibility for moving things forward.

Well that’s it, apart from all the personal little notes I wrote myself about things to chase up for myself or for my library - and there are many of those!   All Helene’s slides are available from Slideshare and I recommend you check them out - they are well worth it.

Wow, how thrilled was I to be offered a place at this Masterclass being held in Melbourne, with Helene Blowers flying in from the US to share her amazing experiences and expertise. Add to that the added bonus of Kathryn Greenhill coming over from Perth to attend as well and it was a perfect way to spend 2 days of library based learning.

So now that the gushing is out of the way, its down to what I got out of it.  And although I am well up to my neck in all this stuff and have been for a few years, I still got plenty of it, with sincere thanks to Helene, Kathryn and the other wonderful participants in this Masterclass (a few of whom I am now in touch with on Facebook and Twitter - hi!)

Exploring the shift

The shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 has been about the shift from Find - seeking information, to Connect - community.

As this connection becomes more widespread and internet access becomes ubiquitous, libraries will no longer be needed for access - what will we be about then?

The first digital divide was about access, the 2nd digital divide is about:

• the ability to do smart searches
• the ability to validate soft information (eg. Wikipedia)
• the ability to find information via hot channels (eg. Digg, Twitter etc)
• the ability to understand the current culture of informal languages (ie. text messaging)
• the ability to get information to travel to you
• the ability to create and re-mix content
• the knowledge that learning is a continual process rather than an achievement

Interestingly I realised that I could not say with total confidence that I could do all these things, but I also know that the vast majority of my professional colleagues definitely couldn’t, so there’s a big challenge for the future.

Helene showed us the Library Meme map: which I will definitely be looking at more closely in the light of our library website redevelopment.

Library 2.0 Meme Map

Patron 2.0 was discussed as enabling our users to contribute content to the library website - a situation that requires radical trust.  We currently allow commenting on our blogs, after approval of course.  Could we relax that further and how else could we and should we be opening our content to our users.  Can we so easily let go of the reins, especially when we are only just now getting the hang of them?

Moving from 1.0 to 2.0

Personal movement is straightforward.  Moving your organisation is more difficult. How do you do it?

1. Learn to listen - show management what people are saying about the library and the technology eg. Google Alerts - find out what the conversation is and respond to it.Pay attention to user generated content and comments.
2. Learn to spy on yourself - get RSS feeds of content you present.
3. Join the conversation - respond to what’s out there.
4. Manage your online reputation - there is a move from organisational to personal brand, with organisations have a personal front. The shift has to be to building the reputation of the individuals, which then reflects on the organisation.
5. Create a home base - a place from which to build your online reputation. A website, blog, Facebook profile, etc. Build it on your own name, engage your passion, start commenting, link & trackback, join other communities, create connections with yourself (between your online presences), continually engage with others. Its not a one off process, so you need to have a strategy.

Does your library’s mission statement translate into the online environment? If not, what has to change?

On a different tangent, I had to agree with Helene that users see the library’s website, not so much as a distinct virtual branch, but as an extension of their local library.  We experience this in our everyday virtual contact with ours users.  Which places an interesting perspective on getting management support for the library website and how to present it to our users, when each of their perspectives can be very different.

And thus ended day one.  For those who are interested in more, Helene has made her presentations available on Slideshare.  In the meantime, I hope to get my notes on Day 2 up soon, so stay tuned.

Tesco Supermarket,Northampton UK

My local supermarket has just added an extension to its store and done some renovations to the rest of the store.  One of those renovations was to change the express checkout area, increasing it from 2 to 4 checkouts.  However, with the increase, came a change in how they were accessed.  The new system required you to line up at one of the open checkouts, which depending on time of day etc, was usually between 2 and 4.

However, this new process was not accepted with delight by either staff or customers.  The majority of people were well aware of the potential unfairness of the situation, in that you could be served slower if you happened to choose the wrong queue.  It happened fairly quickly that customers started going to back to a single queue, ignoring the signage and stepping up to be served as a checkout operator became available.

Staff, on behalf of the customers and the numerous comment they had already received, approached management about the issue, asking them to change it to a single queue, for fairer service.  The response was that such a change would cause unacceptable blockages of aisle space. (I don’t know if they were ignoring or were unaware that 4 queues were doing the same sort of thing anyway).

That could have been the end of it, but it wasn’t.  I’m not privy to what happened behind closed doors, I just know what I gleaned from the girls behind the counter.  Anyway, those wonderful girls started taking a survey of customers, asking their opinion of the new setup and what their preference would be for the arrangement. From what I saw when they asked me the questions, the overwhelming response was that customers didn’t like the new setup and would prefer single queue access.

A few weeks later, I walk into the supermarket and there is now a barrier and guide, for one queue leading into the express checkout area.

Customer Service on Day 357

This hit me on so many levels. Firstly, the whole idea of fairness that both the staff and customers determined needed to be achieved.  Just reminded me that we live in a world with a vast majority of decent people and that moment I was happy to be a part of that larger community.

Second was that the supermarket staff knew their customers and were listening to what they were saying and tried to do something about it.  They took those concerns to management.  Unfortunately at that time, management weren’t listening.  So the staff went away and got the information they needed to support their claims for change.  I am both proud and amazed that someone would stand up for customer interests, which includes my own, like that. It may seem trivial, but it was important enough that staff took it to management, not once but twice.

Third was that management took note of this extra effort and the evidence they were given (even if it was on the second attempt) and took the action necessary to make both staff and customers happy.  I spoke to one staff after the change, who was both suprised, but also very pleased that they had listened and acted - very quickly once the decision was made.

So how does this translate to libraries?  Quite easily, as we are both about customer service.

Do we know our users well enough to know what they don’t like about our libraries or what they would like to happen in our libraries?  Is it more than just guessing at what we think they want? If we don’t know them well enough, why don’t we - we serve them every day?  Also if we don’t know, are we asking them and if not, why not?

If we know, are we telling our management and coming up with ideas for change?  If not, why not?  If we do tell and they don’t seem to be listening are we letting it go, giving lame excuses or are we going to find the information that will help change their minds? I know that there have been times that I have made those lame excuses, when instead I should be fighting for what I know our users want or don’t want. My local supermarket has taught me that it can work.

It can be trivial or it can be major.  But if we are not listening to our customers and what they want and doing what we can to provide it, then we are not really serving them, are we? I know I’ll be trying to do better in future and really keeping my ears and eyes open to what our users want, then communicating it to the people who can make the difference.

If you have any, I would love to hear your stories of where staff have won through to change things in your library, because it was what your users wanted.