On Jun 8, 2006, at 7:34 AM, Steven Carr wrote:
> If you agree with the assumption that in order to create customer
> satisfaction, a service must meet or exceed the expectations of
> that customer, how can a public institution create an expectation
> for their customers? Especially in the public library sector where
> so many strive to be "all things to all people", how do you set
> boundaries on a world of information so that it can be packaged and
> marketed to the customer? ...
>
> Qualified information? Selected information? "Authorized"
> information?
IMHO, I believe the answer to this question lies in your answers to
the questions regarding context as well as your ability to manage
expectations.
What is the purpose of your library and therefore your information
systems? How do the fit within the totality of your institution's
products and services (in the case of public library municipality's
goals), and what sorts of resources (time and money) are allotted to
the library's development and maintenance?
Your library does not exist in a vacuum. It is a reflection of its
hosting institution, and in order for the it to reflect well you will
need to know the goals and priorities of your sponsor. For example,
you need to know the purpose of the hosting institution. What
problems is it trying to solve? How can your information system be
expected to contribute to the solutions? Look to your institution's
mission statement for answers. Here at Notre Dame the library's role
is to help the students, faculty and staff of the University
community do their learning, teaching, and scholarship. It will be
different for a public library, but your town, county, state, etc.
will not expect you to be all things to all people. That is only
realistic if they can and do give you an unlimited budget.
The context of your library/information system will be tempered by
the amount of resources allotted to its development and maintenance.
These resources take the form of time, space, money, hardware,
software, people, and expertise. The implementation and ongoing
maintenance of your information system will require a diverse set of
skills. None of which are necessarily more important than the other.
The people with the necessary skills include subject experts,
leaders, graphic designers, people who can mark up texts, knowledge
workers who can organize content, usability experts, marketers,
programmers, and systems administrators, people people, etc. The
amount of time and energy these sorts of people can bring to the
implementation of your information system is directly proportional to
what your information system will enable people to do and do well.
Once you have the answers to the sorts of questions outlined above
you can begin to temper/manage the expectations of the user. "I'm
sorry Mr. Public. I would love to provide that service for you, but
Mr. Mayor has bugeted X amount of dollars for us, and to do your
service we would need X + Y dollars." "Thank you for your concern Ms.
Public. In the interest of providing education services to Anywhere
(USA), our collection consists of A, B, C but not D. The world of
information is huge and we need to set priorities. Please consider
sharing your concern with our director."
As other people have already alluded, marketing is another form of
managing expectations. Communicate to people what the library does do
in an effort to head off questions about what it doesn't do. In the
flurry of environmental scan-like reports coming out of OCLC over the
past few years, it is quite obvious that people think libraries are
about books. (Sigh.) Books are only one manifestation of data,
information, and knowledge; books represent one facet of libraries.
Thus, it is an example where marketing can help the professsion grow
beyond this stereotype and we can do some expectation management.
Personally, I like your mentioning of qualified, selected, and
authorized information. They are pretty good examples of the sort of
value-add services libraries generally provide and distinguish them
from other institutions. Again, harking back to the OCLC reports,
people seem to know and understand that libraries create and provide
access to qualified and selected content, but when that access is
time-consuming, cumbersome, and inconvenient things like Google trump
catalogs, library websites, and licensed bibliographic databases.
Whether we like it or not, people do not necessarily do the "best"
things, but rather the things that get the job done.
(Whew. That was long!)
--
Eric "We Are Now About 825 People" Morgan
University Libraries of Notre Dame
I'm hiring a Senior Programmer Analyst.
See http://dewey.library.nd.edu/morgan/programmer/.
Received on Fri Jun 09 2006 - 07:37:16 EDT