Blog Lends a Voice to Library Patrons

Forget the stern “quiet, please” stereotype that has dogged librarians through the ages. Staff at the Bentley Library want to hear their public loud and clear. Last fall, they launched a blog to solicit feedback on services and programs from students, faculty and staff.

The 14 Days to Have Your Say blog created a forum for candid discussion, modeled on a similar initiative at Western Washington University.

“There are traditional ways for gathering feedback, such as web page links to forms and surveys, but many people don’t see them as personal,” says Reference Librarian Lisa Curtin, who led the outreach.  “The blog was an immediate way for people to join the conversation. There was an openness and transparency that people liked.”

The invitation was open to the entire Bentley community, but most of the 200-plus bloggers were students. “It’s a generation that has come to expect the immediate connectivity of Web 2.0 through sites like MySpace and Facebook,” observes Curtin, who also serves as coordinator of library research services. “With the blog, they knew my name and knew we were interested in what they were saying.”

Praise and Concerns
In addition to offering kudos on library staffing and resources, bloggers voiced concerns. Topping the list were issues with second-hand smoke outside the Deloitte Café entrance, noise filtering from the café into the main library, poor lighting, and limited checkout periods for popular DVDs. The input sparked some immediate action, for example, installing additional light sconces, making the online reservation system available from off campus, and extending the new-release checkout period to seven days. In the works: No Smoking signs for the café steps, and automated doors to reduce noise from the café.

Phillip Knutel, executive director of academic technology, the library, and online learning, welcomes the constructive criticism.

“As a business school, we owe it to ourselves to be customer-service oriented in finding ways to improve student life with new ideas, processes, features and services. That culture permeates to the library staff; we’re here to serve the Bentley community.”

For his part, Knutel has been known to make evaluating library processes an assignment for seniors in his Managerial Communication course. He also hears regularly from Puja Shah ’11, vice president of academic affairs for the Student Government Association, who forwards library-related comments from her peers. She describes the blog as a useful tool for “students who either don’t know who to contact or wonder whether their voice will be heard.”

Active Listening
Curtin underscores the need to listen.  “After completing the major renovation of a beautiful new building, what’s point of having it if you’re not making people happy?” she asks. “We need to put the right things on the shelves, and make sure we’re giving people what they want.”

The customer focus has inspired staff members to run regular usability studies of the library web site. Comments from the blog helped to inform the latest such study, conducted in fall 2008; another is planned for fall 2009. A Meebo widget for instant messaging, installed on many library web pages, is an added conduit for communication.

“Technology is helping us prompt a younger generation to use what was perceived as just a building filled with dusty books,” Curtin says. “Libraries are definitely a lot more than that.”