Service with a smile :0)

Epic fail on the #libday8 front as I only managed to blog about two of my days. My bad!

So moving swiftly on, I thought I’d share an insight into some recent training we organised with the staff of the English Faculty Library.

Andy and Libby are the editors of a forthcoming book that examines a boutique approach to libraries. During the writing process they realised that their own libraries could be better at providing a tailored service so decided to do something about it. Cue a ‘personalised customer service’ workshop organised by Andy and yours truly.

We started the morning off with a Would I lie to you? icebreaker. As all good icebreakers should, this gave us a chance to loosen up, have a laugh and learn a bit about each other. I learned that we’re mostly a good bunch of liars – I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing to admit publicly!

Once our screws were duly loosened,  we watched some videos to help get our conversational juices flowing. One of which is…

(Ignore the poor quality – it’s worth it)

Obviously this is tongue-in-cheek, but the videos helped us to brainstorm what we feel constitutes excellent (and therefore also poor) customer service:

So, for us at any rate, excellent customer service is…

• Showing a genuine interest in helping our users find the information/data they need.
• Knowing our users – listening to what they want, when and how they want it.
• Being empathetic – realising that different people have different needs AND understanding these needs.
• Providing relevant and timely responses.
• Being flexible – it’s not all about the black and white. Sometimes it’s okay to be grey.
• Going the extra mile – providing that little extra when it’s possible.
• Providing alternative options – when you initially have to say no.
• Being personable – smiling, making eye contact, passing the time of day etc.

In contrast poor customer service happens when…

• Our responses/services are irrelevant.
• We don’t live up to the advertising – i.e. we don’t do what it says on the tin.
• We make assumptions about our users.
• We stick rigidly to the rules and act as ‘jobsworths’.
• Only saying “No!”
• We don’t pay attention – the ‘don’t ask me a question I’m way too busy’ pretence.

(I’m sure all of us are guilty of at least one of the above at one point in our careers!)

After individually scoring ourselves for the current level of customer service we provide (I gave us 7.5/10 – there’s always room for improvement and none for complacency ;0) we discussed what we could better and what we could implement immediately. Our team felt that we could be more approachable (and personable) so, from now on, we’re making a concerted effort to:

• Smile more.
• Make more eye contact with our students.
• Greet people as they enter the Information Centre.
• Walk about the Information Centre more (Andy reliably informs me this is known as doing a ‘sweep’ but I’d like to do more of a ‘sue’).
• Wear our name badges at all times (at work – there’s no need at home my husband knows who I am and my daughter can’t read yet).

  by nubui 

I’m hoping that these small changes are seen positively and that we don’t come across as Stepford Librarians and freak everyone out. Although that could be fun.

The workshop was a great opportunity for us to reflect on our current practice and also to get an outsiders’ perspective. Having a discussion with colleagues from another library felt really refreshing and I, for one, would like to think that more workshops and training could be shared across Cambridge (and Oxford!) libraries. After all, we all face the same issues don’t we?

That’s so yesterday: Day 2 of #libday8

It’s occurred to me that, since my recent announcement that I’ll be leaving the Judge, a potential replacement may read my #libday8 posts with a view to finding out what the job’s really like. If you’re reading this for that purpose let me say one thing – the Judge is a great place to work and Andy is a fantastic boss. Okay, that’s two things but I say them without any agenda (it’s too late for a pay rise right?) Honest like.

Anyway, on to the job in hand. Let me fill you in on my Tuesday (I know, I know that’s so yesterday)…

I had a late start as I’m scheduled to work until 6pm on Tuesdays. For most normal people that would mean a lie-in – for me it means getting up at the same time but having longer to wrestle my 1-year old into her buggy to get her to nursery. So by the time I’d arrived at work I already felt like I’d done a day’s work. But that’s enough of the self-pity.

I started off at a meeting with the team in the School’s Common Room. We have these meetings at the same time every week and it’s a chance for us to come together over coffee and to find out what everyone else has been working on. The idea for weekly meetings came out of a management course I went on in 2010 and I think they work really well. Everyone has something to contribute and to share and I normally come away from them knowing a lot more than I did. That’s got to be a good thing.

The team meeting

After the meeting I staffed the Business Information Point in the Common Room. I didn’t actually get any enquiries from students in person, but this gave me the chance to catch up with my emails, answer some online chat enquiries and to talk to some School staff. All just as important in my humble opinion. Some of the enquiries I dealt with were:

• A plea from a Faculty member asking for help tracking down some articles.
• A request from another Faculty member to sort the problem with the Bloomberg connection in his office.
• Another Business School Librarian asking about the level of support we provide for WRDS.
• Registering non-Judge students who’d filled in our online registration form.

After lunch I was back at my desk in the office, but still answering enquiries (reserving books in high demand, advising on the availability of ebooks, sorting out a WRDS class account…the list goes on). I briefly met with a visiting student from North Korea who I’d been in email correspondence with. It’s always good to put a face to a name and it give me the chance to check that he was able to access the resources and support that he needs. I also had a chance to look over the material for a training session that Andy and I were running this morning (more of which at a later date).

At 5pm it was time for me to cover the issue desk so the rest of the team could go home and I had a chat with one of our alumni about the resources available to her now.

Then 6pm. Time for me to close down the front desk, lock up and leave. Home time!

Not another manic Monday: Day 1 of #libday8

This is my first contribution for the Library Day in the Life Project.

Why am I taking part?  Two reasons really. The first being that I promised myself that I would start blogging again and this provides me with the ideal opportunity. I face the problem that although I know I want to blog, I have no idea what to say. I mean, where to start? Have I been doing anything interesting or innovative? Often the answer to this is a resounding no so what’s a boring librarian to do?! (If anyone has any tips on how to conjure up blog posts I’d be most interested to hear them!)

The second reason is that I don’t think it hurts to ‘take stock’ and to look at what it is I actually do. Do I really spend most of my day replying to emails? I hope not and I hope to prove it this week!

So here’s a quick rundown of my
It started off with me telling a member of our team that I’ll be leaving the Judge in April. I’m switching sides (scandalous I know!) and have accepted the position of Librarian at Hertford College in Oxford. I’d already told the rest of the team so, now that they all knew, I made a quick announcement on Twitter. Afterwards I quickly drafted my resignation letter to make it official. Gulp!

I then sifted through my emails and offered to help with some of the enquiries. (A member of the team is timetabled to answer enquiries on a particular day of the week and it wasn’t my day but we’d received a lot over the weekend.) So I found myself replying to an email from a member of staff in our Executive Education department about tracking down a case-study before turning my attention to a meatier enquiry from a non-Cambridge student who’s looking to research nineteenth century French businesses.

Then, before I knew it, lunchtime!

After lunch I took a turn at our front desk stepping in for a team member who was unexpectedly away for the day. It turned out to be an afternoon full of bread-and-butter stuff: issuing, returning, renewing, reserving books; advising students how to use the self-service terminal; providing photocopier assistance; topping up printing allowances; explaining how to access our databases remotely etc. In the quieter moments I trawled the web for documents relating to library shadowing schemes as I’m part of a small group trying to set one up here in Cambridge. I also wrote up some notes from a meeting I’d organised about the scheme for a librarian who couldn’t attend.

The end of the day saw me catching up with Andy for a chin-wag, gossip and general moan – I’m going to miss that! All in all, a gentle start to the week and not so manic. Fingers crossed the rest of the week follows Monday’s example.

[It seems Andy isn't the only one who can't resist peppering posts with pop culture references!]

It’s, (no longer), oh so quiet

If anyone’s wondering why I haven’t been blogging for the last 14 months, then let me share with you the reason…

Yes, that’s right – my bump eventually made an appearance (13 days past her due date!) and I’ve been spent the majority of 2011 looking after this tiny tiger.

I returned to work full-time at the Judge in October and, since then, have had a manic couple of months juggling my roles as a mother, wife, washerwoman, cleaner, cook, friend…oh and work colleague (of course!) But I’m extremely lucky that our little one has taken to nursery like the proverbial duck to water so I haven’t had to deal with any abandonment issues. On her part at any rate.

Why am I writing this now? Well, my one-and-only New Year’s resolution will be to start blogging again. And, before I tackle some solemn information & library topics, I thought some frivolous navel gazing was in order. So, without further ado, here’s my end-of-year work review :

I’ve enjoyed…

• Being asked to use my brain again (it had felt like it was slowly rotting away).
• The fact that no-one cries at work. Or if they do, they do it in the toilet so I can’t hear them.
• Adult (as in proper NOT dirty raincoat) conversation.
• Being able to drink a whole cup of tea before it goes cold. (If you have a small child you will totally understand this.)

I’ve found it difficult…

• To write. Not as in holding a pen, more as in get the words down on the page/on the screen. I now find myself agonising over word choice and grammar so I hope that more frequent blogging will help.
• Finding clean clothes to wear to work (I’ll admit to having worn some of my hubbie’s clothes to work on more than one occasion although I’ve drawn the line at his underwear.)
• Not referring to myself as ‘Mummy’ when talking to my colleagues.
• Not singing nursery rhymes out loud in the office.
• Not using the word ‘poo’ in everyday conversation.

And for anyone who’s planning their escape (sorry I mean a return to work) some advice I hope will be useful…

Remember to check for baby sick, snot and food remnants in your hair or on your clothing right before leaving the house in the morning. There’s no need to share these things with your colleagues. Honest.

Flying in the face of conventional wisdom

Earlier in the week I attended the first Cambridge Librarian TeachMeet where I gave a short presentation on the approach to library inductions that we adopted at the Cambridge Judge Business School back in 2009. At the time, my allocated presenting time of 7 minutes felt über short and I let this time pressure get to me slightly. I’d therefore like to present our ideas and arguments again here in the hope that they’ll be more eloquently expressed!

The title of my presentation was ‘Flying in the face of conventional wisdom’ because, by and large, our approach ignores the accepted norm for library inductions, i.e. don’t tell your students too much too early. At the Judge we offer interactive, hands-on database training during the students’ first week. These sessions are held in the School’s Computing Lab and last between 1 and 2 hours. Why did we decide to do this? Read on and all will be explained…

In the past, library inductions at the Judge were delivered along the traditional lines: a lecture-theatre presentation (focusing on finding books, library fines, rules & regulations and a brief database demonstration) followed by the obligatory library tour. We felt that this misrepresented our service and the work that we do, as most of our time is spent organising, delivering and promoting the electronic resources that we subscribe to. These resources amount to 80% of our annual budget and really are our ‘bread and butter’ so we believed that a greater emphasis was needed during inductions. Previous students had also indicated, in the annual survey, that an overview of the databases would be beneficial right at the beginning of their courses. This was the confirmation that we needed!

As well as modifying the format, location and content of the induction sessions we decided to change their advertised title from ‘Library Induction’ to ‘Business Databases’. The majority of our students hail from a corporate background and we therefore felt that this title was more fitting. We also thought that it would help to smash the traditional librarian stereotype (i.e. bespectacled women stamping books and shushing people) and hopefully generate more interest and enthusiasm for the sessions.

We did have a couple of concerns about the approach before we rolled it out:

1. Would the students be too distracted by other things at the start of their courses (e.g. making friends, looking cool, finding their way around etc) to take anything useful away from the sessions? Would we end up having to repeat things incessantly throughout the year?
2. Would the students feel too bombarded with information? Would adding to the ‘information overload’ be madness?

We quickly realised that these concerns were largely unfounded as the situation at the Judge is different to other departments at the University. As most of our students have corporate experience, they expect to hit the ground running when they arrive here and, as the old cliché goes, ‘time is money’. It would therefore be inappropriate for us to hold back on the information that we give out during inductions. In addition, we don’t expect the students to remember every single piece of information but some things, no matter how small, will stick.

We’re also conscious of the fact that if we don’t give students the hard sell on our databases early enough, we lose them to Google and Wikipedia. We’re then faced with the battle of seducing them back to our premium resources. Don’t get me wrong, we’re deeply realistic and realise that they’ll use these resources regardless – but we need to dazzle them with our databases early enough so that they get used to using them alongside free web resources.

The results of these changes to our approach? Data gathered via our annual survey showed that in 2008 only 52% of our students remembered the database demonstrations during their inductions compared to 82% in 2009. This increase suggests that the new format had the desired effect, i.e. the greater emphasis on our electronic resources had more impact.

In addition, our database usage statistics went through the roof. Two of the databases we demonstrated in the hands-on sessions (Factiva and Passport GMID) saw an increase of 57% and 45% respectively. We attribute these increases to the fact that the students got ‘down and dirty’ with the databases straight away.  Our student numbers only increased slightly that year so nothing else can explain them!

So a greater recall of the database demonstrations, increased usage stats…what else? We also saw a notable increase (44%) in the number of enquiries received and answered by the Information & Library Services team in that year. Again, we think this is due to the fact that we got the message out there that we are the database people and that we’re here to help our students get the best out of them.

We’ve adopted the same approach this year so, fingers crossed, we’ll see similar results!

My PowerPoint presentation on Slideshare:

[I'd be interested to hear from other librarians as to whether they think this approach would work in their libraries and/or any other methods that have been adopted for similar reasons.]

See also Andy’s post about our new approach.

One for the road

I’ve made it! I’ve finally dragged my sorry behind to the Cam23 finishing line. Now it’s just one small step and then I’ll be able to hold my head high (and go to work in the morning without fear of being ridiculed by my colleagues!) I feel like I should be having ‘one for the road’ (or perhaps more rightly 23) but unfortunately my current condition (with child) prevents me from doing so. Instead I’ll fortify myself with a biscuit barrel and a cup of tea whilst I summarise my Cam23 experience.

But first, as requested, a Wordle…

…woo hoo for Wordles!

Anyway, I suppose it would be appropriate to give a final countdown of my scores for each of the Things:

	Usability	Utility	Likelihood of adoption
iGoogle
RSS
Doodle
Google Calendar
Twitter
Flickr
Slideshare
Delicious
LibraryThing
Facebook
LinkedIn
Zotero
Google Docs
Podcasts			?
Wikis

As you can see from the ‘likelihood of adoption’ column in the above table, the Things I’m I’ve found the least interesting (and are therefore unlikely to take beyond the Cam23 programme) are LibraryThing and LinkedIn although I am going to wait to find out if I start to see value in LinkedIn once I’ve increased my activity on there.

The Things I will personally take forward (or continue to use) are RSS feeds, Twitter, Delicious, Facebook and Google Docs. I’d also like to continue with this blog, but am hoping that this will be an end to the late-night blogging!

As our Information & Library Service has already dabbled with a lot of the tools there are only a couple that I would like to investigate further and perhaps integrate into our service. These are podcasts and wikis although I’d also like to increase the number of RSS feeds that we currently offer.

Looking back on the past three months, I feel as though I’ve had a different experience to a lot of the Cam23 participants, because I’m a member of the project team. Back when I volunteered I had no idea what I was letting myself in for, but I can honestly say that (despite the often frantic feeling I’ve had when trying to research material for posts, support participants and keep up with my own blogging!) this has been the most worthwhile experience I’ve had in Cambridge since I got here.

Not only has the programme introduced me to new tools that I otherwise wouldn’t have had time to look into, it has made me feel part of the Cambridge library community and this has been the greatest benefit to me. It’s very easy to feel isolated in our own libraries (even if there’s a team of you!) and I’ve welcomed the opportunity to meet, interact with and learn from other like-minded librarians. Programmes such as Cam23 wouldn’t be successful if there wasn’t any ‘buy-in’ from the local community and the success of this project is definitely down to the warm welcome, uptake and proactivity from other participants. I’d therefore like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who’s taken part – Thank you!

So long and thanks for all the fish.

I wiki, you wiki, we (can all) wiki…

Here I am almost at the end of my Cam23 journey – the penultimate Thing! Wikis are something that I thought I used regularly and knew about but, now I’ve sat down to write this post, I realise that a) I haven’t really used that many and b) I’ve never used them in the way in which they’re intended. Must try harder!

I’ve consulted Wikipedia on numerous occasions (who hasn’t?!) when I’ve quickly wanted a definition or explanation for a word or topic that I’ve not come across before. And for this purpose (i.e. quick reference) I think it’s great. However, as we say to our students during our teaching sessions, ‘it’s important to remember to consult and cite other sources’ so whenever I want to ensure that the information is accurate I hunt down additional sources. I’ve never actually edited Wikipedia entries as I’m not enough of an afficionado about a subject to write with authority. But if I do happen across any mistakes or typos in the future I will do my duty as a good librarian and edit them.

The Judge’s Information & Library Service has been using a wiki as part of a CamTools site for a couple of years. This site has acted as a portal to our electronic resources and has provided information about the service. In order to populate the site with content, we set up a wiki with various pages which we then displayed. The wiki itself is hidden and visible to (& therefore editable by) staff members only. Although this ‘flies in the face’ of the wiki ethos, we had to put this ‘security’ measure in place to ensure that no prankster students changed our service information. You may think that we should have more faith in our students, but we’re realistic at how tempting it might be to some!

The only public wiki I have edited to date is the one for TeachMeet as I signed up to give a presentation. For projects such as this, it seems obvious that wikis are the best medium to use for organising and planning and I applaud the project team for their initiative.

As I haven’t had a lot of experience in editing a truly collaborative wiki, I decided to add an entry to the Library Routes Project. (I chose not to include my life story here as not everyone will want to hear it. It’s not a bestseller – I realise that. Believe me – I’ve lived it!)

In terms of whether we can properly employ wikis in our information & library service, an immediate project would be to transfer our existing staff manual on to a wiki – an idea already raised by Claudia. Our current manual is created in MS Word, printed out and then, typically, updated on annual basis. Having the manual in a wiki (a la Antioch University – thanks to Miss Crail for bringing this example to my attention) would mean that any member of the team could update it quickly and also refer to it from the PC where they’re working. So we’re just looking for one of the team to take this on – any volunteers?!

My wiki scores:
Usability:  
Utility:  
Likelihood of adoption: