Blog about Libraries

This is the kind of thing that makes libraries indispensible to their communities. Without fail, every time one of my staff does a presentation for the local SBDC or SCORE or whomever, they come back and tell me the same thing, "None of the people there had any idea what we could do for them."

Sometimes I feel like I am sitting on top of a secret stash of gold.

Here is a recent letter to the editor of our local paper concerning the Secret Shopper program we are instituting:

...As a patron, I hold the staff at the library in the highest regard and have always been treated with respect, kindness and cooperation. Therefore, when I read that a "Secret Shopper" program had been instituted to covertly watch the staff members and report on their interaction with the library patrons, I was distressed.

In a large corporation, where one wishes to ensure that a widely scattered staff is filling their responsibilities, such a program might be useful. But I strongly oppose such a program for this library and this group of fine, loyal, intelligent, capable public servants. This is our library; it belongs to the community and not a corporation designed to produce goods to be marketed and sold. In my view, the library is the heart of the community. As trustees, I ask you to please protect one of our greatest assets and do not let it become a commercialized, trendy toy.

This person is absolutely right- we have fine, loyal, intelligent, capable public servants working at this place. Unfortunately, Secret Shopping DOES sound sneaky and underhanded and I can't prevent that. After all, it doesn't work unless it's done in secret. However, that doesn't mean the project has to be a negative experience for staff and I don't care if some people on the outside think this is spying and devious. If my staff feels we are improving upon the great service we already provide and if they don't feel threatened by this project, then we are on the right track.

The Engaged Patron fee waiver.

Just sayin'.

I have been working with my staff lately to create a conversation about customer service. As the manager, I think it is important to make sure we examine service barriers that are beyond their control, stuff that makes it hard for them to do the job.

There are a lot of obvious barriers; organizational/infrastructure, policies and processes, physical layout of service points, etc. But one barrier that has had my attention for a long time is the professional expectation that public desk staff will bring other tasks to the service point. This includes things like sitting at a desk with a cart of books, or working on programming tasks, reading review journals, or ordering materials while simultaneously staffing a reference desk. In some libraries, the running joke is that branch librarians are always at the desk, the implication being that they have no choice but to multitask in this way.

I wonder if this is the best way to provide excellent customer service? Is it realistic of managers and administrators to demand high touch, proactive services if they don't simultaneously commit to examining the demands they put upon those staff members? After all, it doesn't seem fair to load a person down with projects and deadlines if the result is going to be that they fail to notice half the patrons who walk by the desk because their head is buried in their computer screen. It's like asking them to serve two, mutually exclusive masters...deadline driven work and undivided attention to customers.

At the very least, it is critical that we examine what kinds of work people are doing when they staff a public desk. Moreover, we need to do it from the perspective of the uninitiated outsider, the person who approaches a desk (or not), and who really doesn't know what we are doing there. For all they know, the desk is where we do our entire day's work. They have no idea that many of us actually have another desk in a nonpublic area. So, from their point of view they may be interrupting us while we are in the middle of something else. And if we are too busy cutting out felt shapes, or stamping discards what hope can we have that the patron will get our undivided attention?

No, I don't have anything to say about it right now, but it seems like a quick and dirty way to optimize the blog. Cynical?

I like what's going on at Kenton County.

No idea how many people are managing this site, but it definitely gets me thinking about how many cooks need to be in the kitchen (or at least what those cooks are doing)? At MPOW we have about a dozen (no joke here about baking...), which strikes me as being incredibly inefficient for such a small operation. Moreover, it doesn't seem to me that we are using all of our tools the way they were designed. For instance, if you look at Kenton County's program information, everything looks like it is coming from some events management software. To me that seems like an obviously smart thing to do. At my library we have events software, but we still have people creating static pages for their programs. What's more, they even refer users to pages that are generated from the events software (like for program signup). And here is the kicker- when I ask the people doing this whether it makes sense, they tell me it's absolutely the best way and that their design is critical to the marketing of the programs. How critical, I ask?

I had completely forgotten about the proposal to create a .xxx domain, but it got shot down last week.

At a library that doesn't filter (like mine) such a domain would not have made a whole lot of difference anyway. However, from a practical perspective it sure would be nice to have a good way besides filters to keep people from accidentally stumbling onto the graphic stuff. And I am concerned about my staff who then have to field the complaints and who end viewing the stuff too. That kind of environment created a lawsuit in Minneapolis a while back.


Here is the original EEOC ruling from that case, but I don't know what the state of it is now.

I was approached a couple years back by some folks who wanted to place a geocache in our library. It seemed like a fun thing to do, so I asked our Technical Services Department to catalog the logbook and enter it into our catalog. Here is the online logbook.
Kind of a cool way to get people to visit the library...a little Library 2.0 sans Ajax.

I am in the midst of carrying out a Mystery Shopper program at MPOW. We started this project because we believe our own experiences in libraries could actually prevent us from seeing things that non-library people might see and we are willing to admit there must be some basic principles of customer service that exist no matter the organization. Sure, we are not Walmart, but at the same time, the "public service" ethic runs high here and we want to find new ways to improve. So, we hired an outside firm to help us out, a firm that works with businesses to improve their customer service through mystery shopping.

We have done the best we could not to hammer people over the head with negativity, but rather to bring an unvarnished, outsider's perspective to the customer service experience that visitors have at our library. It is about viewing services from a different viewpoint in order to learn something new about ourselves.
Overall, I think my staff has been very positive about the experience. They have asked good questions, they have had healthy, yet not obstructionist criticisms and concerns and they have reacted with ideas and suggestions about how we can improve service on the management side. I couldn't ask for much more, really.

We have received negative comments from outside, people who are concerned that we are pandering to the "business model", which they believe has little in common with public institutions. One complaint is that the library doesn't have to compete with other businesses, so that the customer service environment is just not comparable. This seems like a perfectly valid point to me, but at the same time I believe our approach to this project is right on target; we are not presuming that we need to mimic a retail operation, but rather we recognize there is a real need for us to do the best we can to make the experience of our patrons the best possible. They are the reason we are here and anything we can do to make them leave happy and return again is worth exploring. Does that mean we will soon install greeters, or that we will fire staff for not pursuing our patrons through every corner of the building? Highly doubtful. On the other hand, does it mean we will analyze whether we make patrons feel welcome, or how well we follow up with them, or whether patrons feel like they got the best service we could offer? Absolutely! That's not adopting a "business model"- that's just being responsible about treating your patrons, without whom you do not exist, with the respect and the diligence they are due.

I'll be out for a week or so, lounging on the beach, hitting golfballs into alligator infested lakes, grilling fish from Murrell's inlet and as always, stuffing myself with way more Hog Heaven 'que than a man my size should.