Merrill Stein, Teresa Edge, John M. Kelley, Dane Hewlett, and James F. Trainer
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This article describes a multiple-methods approach to examining and enhancing the quality of walk-in service points at a major university library. Selected methods included focus groups, benchmarking, surveys, transaction analysis, activity mapping, and secret shoppers. The results of the study generated many recommended enhancements, including the consolidation of service desks.
At Villanova University, two forces converged to initiate this continuous quality improvement project at Falvey Memorial Library. The first of these factors was an ongoing interest on the part of the library staff in maximizing services to patrons, both through technology and personal points of contact. The second was Villanova’s continuous quality improvement program, a well-established initiative introduced in 1993 and long spearheaded by the Office of Planning, Training, and Institutional Research (OPTIR). In recent years, several studies have been completed by and for the library dealing with the physical footprint of the library as well as the responsiveness of staff to the needs of their various patrons—students, faculty, staff, alumni, members of the surrounding community, and outside scholars. The present study located precisely the various points of patron service and delved deeper into their functions.
Villanova University and Falvey Memorial Library
Villanova University, a Roman Catholic institution based on the teachings of St. Augustine, is located in a pleasant suburban setting just twelve miles outside of Philadelphia. It is home to more than ten thousand students and more than five hundred faculty members. The university consists of four main colleges (College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Villanova School of Business, College of Engineering, and College of Nursing) and a School of Law. Falvey Library has a staff of about sixty-five, including twenty librarians. The library offers patrons a place for social networking and studious collaboration with wireless network access, a twenty-four hour study lounge and coffee shop, group study rooms, laptop loans, and a rich complement of electronic and digital library resources in a medium-sized academic library environment.
A unique aspect of the Villanova Quality Improvement (VQI) model is its emphasis not only on the application of time-tested work process improvement tools, but on the integration of its efforts with the mission of the university. At Villanova, there are currently more than twenty-five VQI teams involving more than two hundred colleagues from practically all of the offices of the university. Some have a special university-wide goal such as the Incentives and Recognition Team or the Environmental Team, but the vast majority of teams are located within departments with the tri-fold charge of work process improvement, building community, and offering community service. VQI is coordinated by OPTIR. OPTIR staff are experienced in qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, and three have been certified in Lean Six Sigma, a popular system for indentifying and reducing waste and increasing the effectiveness of work functions.
In an effort to seek its own answer to “library as place” or, as Davenport advocates, “in a networked world … place as library,” Falvey seeks to steer a path beyond access versus ownership issues to provide a comfortable and collaborative base from which patrons can share ideas, conduct research, and receive assistance and instruction from within the library, within the colleges, and at a distance.1 Reference and instruction services are becoming academic integration services with liaison information literacy teams; programming of library events has a programming coordinator; technical services is now resource(s) management; “access” means access to a host of services besides checking out and reserving books; and there is a growing need for even more skilled budget management and data-driven assessment coordination past standard monthly statistics.
Literature Review
Even several years ago, Ludwig and Starr wrote that library leaders were predicting “expanded roles for libraries as places where all members of the community can come together, as purposed and expanded learning centers, and as places for intellectual pursuits.”2 Between now and 2025, “Libraries will continue to include areas designed for both group work and privacy. … Libraries will create a multi-functional desk that combines circulation and reference.”3 Church reminds us that locating services together is not merely a merging of services but an interweaving of cultures and that “what is most important is fluidity of ideas.”4 In their study, Harer and Cole concluded that a focus on students, faculty, and stakeholders is the most important aspect of ensuring quality in programs and services.5 Dempsey suggests that “the question we need to address is not the integration of library resources with each other; it is the integration of library services with the learning and research behaviors of users.”6 It is within this context that an improvement study was undertaken.
Through an experience similar to the one at the University of Arizona Library in the early 1990s, Falvey Memorial Library underwent a reorganization of staff and functions with a commitment to focus on the customer and to making more data-based decisions. To that end we chose to employ continuous quality improvement methodology, which, as described by Larson, “provides a system for gathering all of the data related to a process, analyzing it, and developing solutions based on customers’ requirements.”7 We decided to employ a wide variety of methods to gather the data we needed to begin the quality improvement process. The literature provides a few similar examples of a multi-pronged approach to collecting service-oriented data. Winkworth describes the Standard Conference of National and University Libraries (SCONUL) Benchmarking Pilot Project in the United Kingdom, which focused on “advice desks” and “counter services” and utilized site visits, mystery shoppers, staff questionnaires, and customer surveys.8 The Arapahoe Library District in Englewood, Colorado, employed secret shoppers, focus groups, and the quality walk in their year-long service evaluation.9 However, the Falvey study was particularly ambitious because it was composed of nine different data collection techniques completed in a six-month timeframe, some of which required collection over an extended period of time. This is where the VQI initiative became invaluably linked to our efforts.
The Present Study
In August 2005, OPTIR issued a special invitation to all departmental VQI teams reminding them that, through the VQI program, OPTIR staff would assist departments in defining and enhancing work processes. Interested departments were requested to contact OPTIR if they wished to pursue this opportunity. The leader of the VQI team shared this invitation with the library team and subsequently with the director of the library. All concurred that it would be helpful to invite OPTIR staff members to work with the library staff in studying and improving the physical layout of the library and the service points of contact.
A special study team was convened in January 2006. The team was composed of eight members of the library staff from key areas: Media Technologies, Library Access, Budget and Administrative Services, the information desk, Reference and Consulting, the periodicals/media desk, Assessment/Special Projects, and Central Library Administration.
Library personnel engaged in the process included librarians, technical staff, and paraprofessional support staff. Three members of the OPTIR team rounded out the study team, which was facilitated by OPTIR’s director of training and organizational development. On average, the team met every other week from January through June 2006; special homework assignments were often given to sub-teams and completed between meetings.