Got thinking about this topic the other day at work. We are trialling self-serve holds, where the patron collects their own hold. We are trialling it, because our holds are getting out of control, since we changed our LMS with a consortia of now 12 library services and dropped our holds fee. So now our users have access to the collections of 12 public library services, through our holds facility and it doesn’t cost them anything. We are getting so many holds that we don’t have enough room at the desk to hold them and it was causing all sorts of issues.
Anyway, the trial has only started this week and the first I heard about how it was going, was the fact that they had already had a complaint. We do things that our patrons don’t want all the time. We introduced library fines years ago and have lending limits on our collections. Quite a few years ago we stopped stamping our items and starting giving people receipts for their loans and we had an uproar of complaints and people almost begging to be able to stamp items themselves, if nothing else. Many, many years later, we still have the odd complaint about receipts, but these days its usually because they lost their receipt and then incurred overdue fines for not returning their items on time.
We have gaming consoles in one of our branches and are launching it in 2 others this week. When our first branch went live, we had a raft of complaints, which I thought our library CEO handled very well. A lot of people didn’t like it, but that hasn’t stopped us from installing them in 2 other branches.
Why don’t our users want these things? Because they perceive that its not better for them, or as with the gaming consoles, can be detrimental. Sometimes its because it doesn’t fit the image of what a public library is or does (as with many of the gaming complaints). But at what point do we do things or stop doing them, despite people not liking it?
We introduced fines many years ago because our average loan period, which should have been about 2 1/2 weeks, with items having either a 1 week or 4 week loan, was averaging about 6 weeks. We introduced fines so that people would be inspired to return items in a more timely manner, thereby making them available to all our users in a fairer manner. The same reasoning of fairness applies to our limit of 1 renewal and our limits on DVD, CD and video loans.
So I have some questions: What is the percentage of dissatisatisfaction you accept, before you stop a service or restriction? ie. proportion of people that are unhappy with something - 50%? 80%? Is there a limit or do other factors come into play to balance against those proportions? I know printing receipts has markedly reduced the possibility of RSI from the stamping process. How long do you trial something that causes dissatisfaction? In other words, how long do you give your users to get used to it and the benefits (because hopefully it will ultimately benefit them in some way) it produces, before you give up it? For our loan limits, it was decades!
Would love to hear of your experiences of when you give your users what they don’t want.
It was my birthday the other day. Unfortunately I had a staff meeting and an appointment on that day which was my day off, as well as the regular school drop off, pickup and swimming lessons. So it wasn’t a day to relax. However, it was a day I learnt a bit about myself that I guess I have known, but never really realised and it was a day filled with many moments of happiness, many of which had some sort of electronic origin.
