User survey – how we do it

It is the season for user surveys in college libraries and learning resources centres. It must be exciting – learning something new about our students and ourselves.

In my library, we are already done! – I spent the recent half term week analysing the survey results and now contacting tutors and students to clarify their concerns, invite for collaboration and answer their complaints; also, preparing to update the team and making a task list to address all the above. – Everything is treated as an opportunity for developing the service. You can see the results on our blog; they aren’t great (judging by the CoLRiC PII questions the survey includes) – we had better years.

Experientially, we have worked out the way of conducting an annual survey that works best for us; we have learnt also to ask only the questions we really can utilise – nothing out of sheer curiosity.

The survey is done online and on paper – to capture the users of different preferences. This year we moved to Google Docs – it gives enough flexibility and plenty of independence. The online form can be seen at http://goo.gl/DiJBEA. The output can be saved as an Excel spreadsheet; some basic data filtering and chart creation skills (any Microsoft Office Excel book has it) will help to build attractive visual representations of the users’ replies.

We are using Heritage LMS; it allows sending email notifications to the selected groups of users; in this case, an invitation to fill the online survey was sent to anyone who made at least one loan this year – we call them active users. There is no much point in asking about use of the library those who have not used it at all; however posting the link to the college’s Moodle home page allows us to capture non-users’ views of what will make the library more attractive to them. Also, college staff could access the survey from the extranet. About 70% of all submissions were made on paper; a couple of my colleagues transferred those replies into Google Docs using the same online form our users did – it is easier than inputting data into the spreadsheet directly.

One of the tricks for analysing the survey is asking yourself meaningful questions – there is no much point in comparing how many members of staff filled the questionnaire and how many – students. What percentage of students is aware of ebooks after a library induction in comparison to those who didn’t have that induction makes more sense.

(Written for the CoLRiC Newsletter)

Professional development and progression opportunities in FE libraries

My CoFHE Conference 2010 paper.

A year ago, when I was acting College Librarian, I had to look at the recruitment practice in my College and I was somewhat puzzled: only "good GCSEs/O-Levels" were expected from candidates for posts as Learning Resources Assistant (LRA). A minimal library-related qualification was expected from Senior LRAs.

I was puzzled because the vast number of learners coming to the library with enquiries were on programmes exceeding GCSE level. An apparent discrepancy in qualifications and skills of library support staff on the one hand, and learners’ needs – as I understood them – has bothered me. Our employers would not dream of allowing the same to happen in classrooms.

Another issue I got concerned with was the virtual impossibility for support staff to move up the ladder to professional posts in a library.

This paper is an attempt to look critically at the current situation with recruitment practice and professional progression and development opportunities in FE libraries.

In the student's shoes

One of unexpected outcomes of entering the Award for Teaching in the Lifelong Learning Sector course, PTLLS, was my ability to look at learning resources provision in the College through the learners’ eyes. It made me question some assumptions librarians get during their professional training.

Being a student in Atherstone, one of the College's outreach centres, means having a limited access to books; at the same time, very few core texts for Teacher Training have been published as e-books yet. To address the difficulties, the College library has done several things:

• we checked all the resources on the reading list whether new editions were available;
• purchased additional copies of the most popular texts even if it meant having a dozen or more copies of the same title (to make sure that nobody has to wait for more than a couple of weeks for a core text);
• created a simple search (http://bit.ly/ptlls_read) on the library online catalogue, Heritage, which would bring up on the screen all the recommended resources in one click;
• made it possible to request library books online for collection and return in Atherstone;
• and finally, promoted all our efforts to students.

After seven months, we have looked at the results and they were astounding. We expected an increase in book loans by PTLLS students, but nothing like 643% we got, from 143 loans previous year to 920 in 2009-2010! (The increase in students' number was very small.)