Data from our Campus Management System and Smartcard Databases are updated centrally overnight. The Library Management System takes 4 data feeds per day at 9am, 3pm, 9pm and 3am and provides us with current information on students and staff.
We have information on new student numbers, updated on a weekly basis, allowing us to plan services and provide resources appropriately.
We distinguish between different user groups and provide services as appropriate. We reviewed all membership categories for non-Newcastle University library members. Membership is now more transparent with categories grouped by borrowing and access only, and available services streamlined. (Docs A, B & C)
This year we also reviewed the NHS membership, which was part of the new contract with them. On request from the NHS their membership is now borrowing or access only. This involved liaising with NUIT in the creation of the new NHS Access Smartcard. (Doc D)
All non-university borrowers have their Smartcards issued for 1 year and are allowed 8 long loan items.
We continue to use headcount data to make informed decisions about changes and improvements to service provision, such as reviewing opening hours across the Library service. We also collect data from our Library Management System through Analytics e.g. NHS renewals/new borrowers and SCONUL statistics. Liaison staff also use this data to provide snapshots of Library use by Faculty/School, which they include in their School reports.
At the completion of each run of the HSS8002 module, the Library Liaison team analyse the comments from students which feature on the module feedback form. This is a mixture of Likert scale questions and free text boxes. Together with feedback received during face to face teaching sessions, and the Programmes Student Voice Committee, we decide what changes we would like to incorporate in next year’s module. Over the Summer we re-looked at the design and functionality of the online content on Blackboard and implemented changes to make the navigation easier. We have also reduced the number of online forums and threads.
We carry out regular Mystery Shopping exercises to test our service provision. We have a longstanding reciprocal mystery shopping project with Northumbria University Library. This term we have piloted mystery shopping of the Philip Robinson Library using students who are not regular users of that facility (Doc A).
We consulted extensively with students about our loan policy changes, for example, using informal surveys in the Library, course committees and surveys via the app (Doc B).
The new Accessibility Group started its work with an online consultation via the University app of students registered with Student Wellbeing to ensure the group's priorities were informed by those of the students (Doc C) .Students were asked if they were willing to be contacted for more detailed feedback. A wheelchair user agreed to accompany staff around the Philip Robinson Library and her insights have fed into changes that have been implemented.
'Your Library Your Choice' was a student consultation about study space preferences depending on the activity users were engaged in. The results were used, for example, in the Marjorie Robinson refurbishment where we added PCs onto the silent floors. UX was also used to inform the refurbishment of the Walton Library and Your Space in the Philip Robinson and is covered in more detail in 2.1.2.
The Library’s system development team are continually creating new and innovative ways for our customers to use and explore Library services. We have introduced a new Library Search and reading list system, both of which are now mobile responsive allowing our customers to access the information from multiple devices. Furthermore, any newly created webpages are designed with mobile in mind; customer feedback and analytic data support this decision.
We have also been working closely with central IT to develop a strategy to allow us to further develop the Library section of the University app. We feel this is important as we believe the Library’s system development team are best placed to understand what our customers’ requirements are.
We conducted a 'card sort' exercise with 20 students to get a better understanding of how our customers use the Library website. Findings born out of this will go towards helping us redesign the website over the coming months (Doc D).
Liaison staff regularly attend student/staff committees, Faculty teaching committees and Away Days, Boards of Studies and other university meetings to make sure we understand the needs and preferences of our users. The team also use two different feedback forms - one for teaching sessions and one for 1:1 consultations with students, so they can analyse the impact of the sessions, as well as inspiration when making improvements to our teaching sessions.
The introduction of the online module HSS8002 was inspired by student feedback that revealed that the face-to-face mode of delivery did not meet the demands of a busy PhD schedule and that a blended learning approach would be more beneficial.
The Liaison team have been engaging and harnessing the student's voice through guest blog posts and Twitter takeovers - so far we have had students from Law blogging and we have a student from English Literature lined up for a future blog: https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/subject-support/category/guest-post/. Students from the Creative Writing Society took over the Lib-Arts Twitter for the night #NaNoWriMo18: https://twitter.com/i/moments/1065265041694486529.
Special Collections have introduced the practice of requesting feedback from module leaders (in addition to student feedback) following teaching sessions using Special Collection materials. This has provided insight into the impact of using Special Collection Material in module delivery and design, and has ultimately improved the planning and delivery of these sessions.
The Walton Library undertook observational research to determine if roving support could further improve the Library service as well as gain a deeper understanding of customer needs. Data collected during the trial showed that student engagement with roving was significant, and also helped to uncover hotspots and areas for improvement.
Our online support Library help is perfectly suited to helping those who are hard to reach or disadvantaged. Students can contact us 24/7 and due to the multi-channel nature of the service (email, chat, telephone, or face to face service), users are empowered to use the contact method which most suits their needs. This can be a lifeline for many students and especially for those students who are at a distance and can't physically come in to the Library building itself (Doc A).
We continue to review customer services for users with disabilities and make improvements. Our latest consultation via the University App took place in May and is informing our planning and priorities for refurbishing our Accessible rooms (Doc B). We are also in the process of introducing a reservation service for students with disabilities that will allow them to use this service for items not on loan so that books can be retrieved by Library staff (Doc C). This will ensure a streamlined and discreet service and will offer greater choice as the existing method of pick from shelf will still be available. The assessor will have the opportunity to talk to staff involved in a range of our accessibility activities as part of the programme on the 17th December.
Over the course of the last 2 years we have doubled the booking time of the majority of the accessible study rooms to four hours, in light of customer feedback. We also completed a project to retrospectively add subtitles to all appropriate Library videos. Ground floor accessible study rooms have been opened at the Philip Robinson and Marjorie Robinson Libraries, so that students who cannot use our stairs or lifts have access to these facilities.
Our Information literacy materials are developed using Universal Design principles, to ensure they are accessible in multiple formats and accessible to customers with specific needs. In addition to customers with a disability, this may include customers accessing resources on mobile devices, with poor Internet connections, and considering different learning styles. Integrating materials into the VLE also gives students access at point of need.
For our overseas students in Singapore, the SAgE Liaison team created an information skills session via recorded video to ensure that the students had equal information literacy support as our on-campus students. There were also online ‘drop-in’ sessions via video link for any problems or questions regarding our Library Resources.
Student Wellbeing work closely with the Library to deliver projects and services to customers. This year we have launched the Be Well@NCL project, a book collection that can be borrowed by students or staff to help understand and manage their mental health and wellbeing.
The Library education outreach team continue to support the University’s commitment to improve access, success and progression among students from under-represented groups through the provision of workshops, projects and online resources to support and inspire school children from Key Stage 2 - 5. Recent projects include ‘Sir Lawrence Arthur Pattinson: The story of a First World War One Pilot’ – a NHLF funded project to inspire Year 9 and 10 students in engineering, developed in collaboration with School of Engineering, NESLAM, Rolls Royce, RAF and STEM creative practitioner (Doc D).
Our Library Marketing and Communications Framework is the basis for all our marketing activities (Doc A) and supports the aims and objectives of the Library's Marketing & Communications Group.
When it came to re-writing our vision M&C Framework in 2018/19, the Marketing & Communications Group strongly felt that it was important to move towards producing a framework to inspire and offer direction to the Library’s marketing activity and customer engagement rather than offer a detailed, prescriptive strategy. In the years since the original strategy was written, colleague buy-in has been secured and an understanding of the importance of marketing as fundamental to service improvement has become embedded into our culture. This framework has been contextualised with best practice examples from the Library’s recent engagement activities, and capitalises on lessons learnt. As such, the more we worked on distilling our marketing strategy into three guiding principles, the more keenly we felt that any customer engagement strategy belonged within this framework. One of our key Library values is “the customer is at the heart of everything we do” and this is evident in our M&C practice - service developments begin with feedback/customer engagement and involve active engagement throughout the process, including the all-important feedback. To ensure this engagement and feedback loop remains a focal point, we are highlighting these elements in our assessment of each campaign.
The group also put together a step-by-step guide for Library staff to use when they are planning an event or a promotion, to ensure they cover all bases and get the best possible engagement out of it (Doc B).
Consultation is central to all we do and we use a variety of different methods to do this. In addition to the activities listed below, we also use UX methodology extensively and this is evidenced elsewhere in 2.1.2.
We have an online presence on the Library website asking our customers to tell us what they think (there are also physical comment forms in the library should anyone wish to engage in that way). We also clearly tell customers what has happened in response to comments as a whole in our summarising actions section, along with giving all customers access to be able to browse individual comments and responses.
In addition to our attendance and contribution at faculty and student committees, we use school action plans to create more opportunities to consult with the staff and students themselves.
Academic schools send our Liaison teams wish lists of databases they would like us to buy. We then organise database trials and consult with the schools and take into consideration their comments (Doc A). We weigh up this feedback along with financial budgets and make a decision on whether to buy the resource or not. The purchases that we do proceed with are then communicated through our newsletters to the schools, as well as on our Library Guides.
Usability testing and ongoing feedback was central to the development of the Subject Guides. Customer feedback and observed usability led to a fundamental change in the navigation in the second year of the project (Docs B & C).
We used a variety of methods to consult with customers about the loan policy changes, including informal chats in the Library, conversations at course committees and online via the University App. We also used the App to distribute the recent consultation with students registered with Student Wellbeing (Doc D).
We consulted extensively for the work we carried out to refurbish space on level 2 to ensure that our customers would find the changes beneficial and it would improve their overall library experience (Doc E).
As part of a review of services to the NHS, all NHS members were surveyed in summer 2018 (Doc F). The results of the survey informed the renewal of the NHS contract for 2019-20. A survey into NHS use of electronic resources is also carried out on an annual basis to identify which resources are of value to members.
We regularly review our promotional calendar of events to make sure it is up-to-date and reflects current demands (Doc A). This has also been transferred to the Marketing & Comms group Planner on Office 365 so we can better organise any promotional activities and events via the group.
For our overseas students in Singapore, the SAgE Liaison team created an information skills session via video to ensure that the students had equal information literacy support as our on-campus students. We were also online ‘drop-in’ sessions via video link for any problems or questions regarding our Library Resources.
Usability testing with a range of our customers was central to the LibGuides project (Docs B, C & D) and has led to improvements to the Subject and Resource Guides that exceeded to original scope of the project. Customer feedback resulted in improved navigation, highly visual but accessible guides, where information can be found more quickly and easily.
We also recently amended the liaison one-to-one consultation feedback form to include a Likert scale so that more customers would be more likely to engage with it. This enables us to collate the results and make any necessary relevant changes to our consultation session format.
The feedback tab within our Marketing, Promotion and Feedback LibGuide outlines a chosen range of methods and tools, the campaigns which they have been used in and the advantages and disadvantages of each. This allows us to not only plan which methods are appropriate, but also to reflect on the campaign afterwards to see how well the chosen methods have worked.
In response to an objective to create a new strategy allowing the Liaison, Special Collections and WDC teams to consistently gather teaching feedback, we held scoping interviews; delivered a teaching clinic which explored the differences between measuring learning and satisfaction; and reported back through the Library Education Group, with examples of best practice and successful case studies.
Due to the number of surveys that students are expected to contribute to, there is a University policy that we should not carry out any additional large scale surveys. Instead, we analyse the results of national university surveys such as National Student Survey (Doc A), Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (Doc B) and Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (Doc C). We perform consistently well in these surveys when benchmarked against our comparators. A recent article in the Library staff newsletter titled 'Student Voice Update' summarised the four major surveys to raise awareness amongst staff (Doc D).
We use our Tell Us What You Think system to gather feedback and measure satisfaction with our services.
We undertake teaching feedback weeks three times a year whereby we hand out surveys which enable us to measure satisfaction with our teaching sessions (Doc E).
We analyse the results of national surveys such as National Student Survey (Doc A), Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey and Postgraduate Research Experience Survey.
Results are analysed at Library and School levels and results reported to Faculty and student/staff committees by way of annual reports. For example the School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape (SAPL) action plan 2018/19 outlines what we have done with regards to responding to poor feedback and engagement with Architectural students (Doc B).
We publicise all comments and replies from our Tell Us What You Think service and provide an annual analysis of comments and summary of actions taken.
The National Student Survey and Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey refer specifically to the provision of Library services "The library resources and services are good enough for my needs" (Doc A). The Postgraduate Research Experience Survey contains four questions about customer experience with resources relevant to the Library (Doc B). As the questions in all these surveys are limited we use the free text survey comments extensively to gain customer insight.
We do have more influence however on the questions that we ask in our own smaller scale surveys, such as the teaching survey "Will what you've learned today be useful to you in the future?" (Doc C) and our mystery shopping survey (Doc D).
Mystery shopping is carried out annually in collaboration with Northumbria University. The methodology is reviewed each year to ensure we are testing any new or changed services. We rotate which library location to shop and select a building based on where there have been significant changes. This term we have piloted using student mystery shoppers at the Philip Robinson, aiming to select new students or students who usually use one of our other locations.
We carried out an extensive online consultation of students with disabilities, with questions that explored all areas of the library offer (Doc E).
We set challenging targets in our Library Standards, and our levels are improving.
We set a challenging target of 90% at subject level in all national surveys. (Docs A & B)
Our overall satisfaction rating in the National Student Survey is 90% (Doc A), our overall satisfaction rating in the Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey is 89% (Doc B), we have reached/exceeded the majority of our targets for 2011-2019 in the Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (Doc C).
By analysing customer experience and responding directly to feedback, we have made many service improvements over the last 3 years, including:
A full list of service improvements made in response to Tell Us What You Think is available online.
Data gathered to analyse customer journeys, established the growing importance of Library Search, as opposed to the archives search site, as an initial starting point for undergraduate students seeking resources within Special Collections. We have subsequently made archive collection descriptions available via Library Search – an innovative project which has enhanced the visibility of these complex collections.
We have implemented a book drop facility at Helix so students who are primarily based there for their studies don't need to make the journey to Philip Robinson Library to simply drop off their books. We are also piloting book drop off (for any library books) at Walton and Law libraries. We are monitoring these stats (Doc D) and will review in the new year to see whether we should make it a permanent service offer.
In response to student feedback, Medicine in Literature collection (located at the Walton Library) has been overhauled to ensure it stays relevant and useful to our customers, including broadening the diversity of authors, moving the collection to a more prominent location and hosting events with local authors to increase awareness and impact.
Feedback from students who had previously taken the HaSS module HSS8002, informed the changes made to the newly designed blended learning experience of the module, especially the student’s journey within the module and the flexibility of the module, allowing the students to learn anytime and anywhere.
On-going changes in the way in which Special Collections hold collection metadata have meant that this year we have introduced a new catalogue search facility. This is the latest development of our ongoing customer journey project to improve the way in which Special Collection customers find and order Special Collection material.
Books On Time is a service where students can ask us to purchase a copy of a book if we do not have it in stock already and they think it would be useful for their assignment, research or course. The project to streamline this service was initiated in order to provide students with a seamless service for requesting new books via a single online form.
We undertook an extensive review of customer experience in our L2 space to ensure that any changes made would be beneficial to our customers. This included observational research and analysis of how the space was being used (Doc E).