Customer service assessments have become increasingly popular with university libraries over the past decade, offering a way to enhance the student experience with a consistent, external review of services and staff development, and providing successful universities with a charter mark to show their achievement. Yet, with many institutions under pressure to cut costs, developing an in-house, bespoke library excellence standard might be more efficient.
Instead of an intensive assessment once a year, this approach enables you to demonstrate a lighter touch, with a combination of biannual, annual or multi-year structured review cycles that reflect the academic calendar and allow you to respond to your own institution’s circumstances. Here, we outline 10 potential elements to include.
Member experience
Most libraries offer multiple channels for users to give feedback about service experiences. For students, this includes student representatives, internal surveys and national surveys, such as the National Student Survey (NSS) or Postgraduate Taught Survey (PTES). For staff, this can be feedback shared with subject librarians and faculty-based teaching and learning representatives, or through staff surveys. For visitors, this could be via feedback forms.
A library excellence standard would map out when feedback will be received, analysis and data triangulation approaches, and when library action plans need to be updated. It could also feature a schedule for reviewing feedback channels themselves, to ensure that these remain aligned to changing library priorities and are manageable given available resources.
Collection development
Librarians routinely undertake library collection reviews to ensure they are meeting university needs. First, consider physical borrowing and digital downloads, and the associated return on investment, illustrated by cost per download for digital resources.
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Ensure the relevance of your library collection, based on academic requests to update course reading and resource lists. Also, cover the disposal of damaged or out-of-date stock to make space for new resources, and how you’re maintaining suitable student-to-resource ratios.
Finally, reviewing the extent to which the existing collection will accommodate proposed new courses should be an ongoing activity. Planning collection development reviews effectively and consistently is critical to safeguarding excellence and should be a fundamental part of a standard.
Collection gateways
In this era of rapid digital transformation, it is important for a library team to periodically review the accessibility, usability and effective integration of their library website, catalogue, reading lists and discovery platform. Collecting dedicated feedback on existing systems could be a specific focus for a recurrent multi-year evaluation project, dovetailing with licence renewal or system procurement timeframes. This would need to be undertaken in partnership with key stakeholders, such as the students’ union, to ensure that student voice is at the heart of decision-making.
Policy and process
A review cycle for library policies will ensure content remains up to date and aligned to wider institutional activities. Depending on the policy, it might be better to undertake reviews on an annual or biannual basis. Similarly, pre-planned, consistent reviews of the wide range of library operational processes, such as document supply or interlibrary loans, will ensure they remain efficient and effective.
Data sharing
Libraries provide rich sources of data to be mined. Visits to library spaces, reading list click-through rates and enquiry topics can all offer valuable insight. A library excellence standard would include a review cycle to assess the suitability of existing data feeds and reports to ensure the data is being used optimally. This could include how library data is supporting an institutional learning analytics platform and associated student engagement monitoring. The standard would also include dates for all external data returns, such as the annual Society of College, National and University Libraries submission.
Outreach
Library teams will often contribute to outreach activities to inspire future generations of students. For example, many university libraries provide Extended Project Qualification support to local sixth forms and colleges. To identify if key local educators are engaging, library teams should work with corresponding access and outreach counterparts on a routine basis.
A library excellence standard could define parameters by which the intended reach and impact of outreach efforts can be evaluated and periodically reviewed.
Staff development
In addition to annual staff professional development reviews, a library excellence standard would include a strategic staff development plan. For example, pre-planning annual developmental events that coincide with the release of new library metrics, such as the NSS or PTES results. You could also include scheduled biannual checks that ensure staff are up to date with mandatory training, such as fire safety.
Internal promotion
Promote library developments to the university community, embedding a pre-planned communications cycle included within the standard. It can then be reviewed on an annual basis. Scheduled library progress reports to university committees, articles in staff and student newsletters and potentially presentations at teaching and learning conferences or events can all be included.
When communications are pre-planned, you can ensure key library messages routinely coincide with specific institutional activities, such as student engagement or academics authoring course enhancement plans.
External dissemination
Higher education library teams should routinely seek to share new practices and/or findings from evaluation or research projects with the wider sector audience. A library excellence standard would include indicative dates for preparing proposals for annual conferences. Examples of relevant conferences would include the Learning Information and Library Access Conference or Customer Service Group UK. The Association for Learning Development in Higher Education conference would also be relevant for universities with academic skills support.
Compliance
For completeness, include a schedule for undertaking compliance audits in your standard. For example, health and safety risk assessments, copyright activity, library building inspections or disaster response and recovery plans.
While the above activities will be part of business-as-usual within most university libraries, team structures can mean that functions often operate discreetly. An overarching library excellence standard provides a mechanism to pre-plan recurrent packages of work, ensuring better-coordinated activity and potential to optimise cross team working and efficiency.
We invite readers to comment on this proposal. Are there additional dimensions that should be included within a library excellence standard?
Steve Briggs is director of learning, teaching and libraries and Carly Ramirez-Herelle is head of library and academy services, both at the University of Bedfordshire.
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