How To Tell If They Really Love Your Library
This is a profession that promotes the idea of loving a library. If you need some evidence just visit ILoveLibraries.org. If you find it difficult to express love for a building, then you can shift...
View ArticleBe A Solutions Provider Not Just An Ingredients Supplier
Recommending that librarians should provide different levels of service to community members is right up there with advocating for the end of reference desks or a future dominated by bookless...
View ArticleExceeding Expectations Depends On What They Are
Have you ever publicly stated or even thought that part of what we should try to accomplish in our libraries is to exceed the expectations of community members? I know I have. I did a search of all my...
View ArticleDesigning a Better Library Learning Experience
Librarians are educators. We may be instructing more formally in the classroom or less formally in our offices, at a service desk or somewhere on campus, but for most practicing librarians the work...
View ArticleGet In Touch With Your Touchpoints
Despite making multiple references to touchpoints in past DBL posts and in presentations, it is a real challenge to find any substantive information about touchpoints. What is their significance in...
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Usability And User Experience – There Is A Difference
While it’s not always the case, on those occasions when I come across a position description for a user experience librarian or hear an existing user experience librarian describe his or her job, it...
View ArticleBlending The Physical And Virtual For One Much Better Library Experience
Virtual libraries, for many community members, offer the best library experience. With access to vast amounts of content from the desktop, from any distance, supplemented by virtual support, online...
View ArticleDesigning The Library Experience The Community Can’t Get Anywhere Else
While almost every academic librarian I speak with shares the same story about a resurgence in the use of the library, I don’t doubt that we’d all like to see an even greater number of our community...
View ArticleFocusing the Library Experience: The Members You Have Or The Ones You Want
It happens to all of us who do library instruction. For one reason or another we must decline an invitation to meet with a class. It happened to me earlier this semester when I had to pass on meeting...
View ArticleReader. Patron. User. Member. Why Not Customer?
It’s perhaps one of the most asked questions among librarians. What do you call the people who use your library? Based on my own reading of the literature, our listservs and many conversations,...
View ArticleLibrary Community Member’s Quality of Life Bill of Rights
There are times when I wish our library building and equipment could provide a better user experience simply by virtue of consistently and successfully delivering on the most basic set of user...
View ArticleService Does Matter In Higher Education
Though slow to come around, the signs indicate that there is an increased awareness in higher education that the quality of services delivered does matter. When students are behaving more like...
View ArticleGetting Community Members Beyond The Level One Library Experience
Among the more recognized and often repeated findings emerging from Ithaka S & R’s faculty research studies, including the recent 2012 report, is the revelation that faculty primarily perceive the...
View ArticleSmall Details of the Library Experience May Matter the Most
There’s a new book garnering attention because it brings a new perspective to design thinking. What makes it stand out is that it’s a really small idea. Micro-small in fact. That certainly has a...
View ArticleWho Is Your Library’s Chief Customer Officer?
Chief “anything” officers are rarely found in libraries of any type, but the concept of a single administrator who takes responsibility for the end-to-end implementation or responsibility for some...
View ArticleRecent User Experience: Greeters – NO / Preemptive Support – YES
Librarians can learn from reflecting on their own experiences as users – both the good and the bad. Taking time to pay attention to our personal experiences encourages us to think about the experience...
View ArticleShifting Too Far To The Experience
On a recent visit to the new Hunt Library at the Centennial Campus of the North Carolina State University, I observed an unusual sight – for most libraries that is. A group of individuals, they might...
View ArticleBenefits Not Features: Think Like a Copywriter
I was at the reference desk when this fellow came over and said someone had told him he could get access to Lexis/Nexis through the university library. Turns out he was one of our adjunct faculty...
View ArticleBuild It And They Will Come
Proposals to build a new library facility will almost always be met with some community resistance these days. Taxpayers who are non-library users will question why they should be required to...
View ArticleAge As a Factor In Experiencing The Library
Academic librarians mostly encounter community members in the 18-22 bracket, but we serve older individuals as well be they faculty members, alumni, second-career learners and members of the public....
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