Bringing Services Along for the Ride
As someone who answers people’s problems I’ve found that they are often unaware of the services that the library has to offer. The reasons for this are numerous and be everything from poor site design to a lack of marketing. I’ve been seeing a pattern lately of where people are coming to a halt and that is usually related to the OPAC. The reason for this is that the OPAC is practically it’s own entity. For example if you go to the MSU Homepage you’ll see that the quick links point straight to the OPAC. I’m finding more and more people are accessing the OPAC without every visiting the library website. With the lack of information about related services some people can be left in the dust. While it can be argued that they can follow a link to the library and then dig through it for information, the fact remains that the OPAC could be a place for ADVERTISING services. People are at our OPAC usually to do research and so it would be wise to promote research related services there. I’ve wrote a more detailed write-up, along with a mock-up at my blog.
I think Stephen Manes says it best:
My biggest complaint is that some libraries’ Web sites don’t detail the amazing range of services they offer online until you cough up a card number. Memo to those insular institutions: Put the info in the shop windows out front and I bet you’ll see a lot more card-carrying customers walking through the electronic doors.
The reason I bring this up here is that this could easily happen when dealing with portal projects and the like. Much of the discussion is about how to bring the search and information to the user, but how do you bring the rest of the library along with it? Should a page in a portal give links to related services? How do you push information and presence? An alternate question would be how do you pull people back to the library from these external sources. If anyone has examples of a service they created that brings takes advantage of the context to promote services, please share.
Technorati Tags: customer service, library, opac, marketing, services
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4 Responses to “Bringing Services Along for the Ride”
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August 8th, 2005 at 3:40 pm
At SPL we have the catalog suggest subscription databases that you might want to try depending on what you search on. To see it in action, go to catalog.spl.org and do a keyword search on “news” or “XML” (for instance).
August 9th, 2005 at 4:16 pm
That’s some nice work, caseydurfee, it brings to mind a suggestion from Brad.
The catalog has lost a lot of prominence to online databases (I see you’ve got Safari full-text books too), so it leaves patrons at a loss to know where they should search. Metasearch is one attempt to solve this, but I think it comes up short in a lot of ways. The SPL solution shows the smarts and elegance I’m looking for.
August 20th, 2005 at 8:48 pm
This is a great observation, Ryan, and I think you are absolutely right about the importance of services.
But advertising services is tricky.
Most users seek out services at point-of-need. Interlibrary loan and research help (i.e., reference) services are most useful to a library user when they can’t find what they are looking for.
The problem with advertising those services at the level of the library home page or even the catalog home page is that, at that level, the user doesn’t really know that they need the service — and thus largely ignore such information.
But consider a different approach: About 95% of our interlibrary loan traffic here at San Marcos comes from SFX. When a user selects our SFX button from a search result in one of our research databases, SFX determines whether we have the article online or in print. If neither of those is available, SFX offers the user a pre-populated ILL form.
It’s a service at point-of-need.
The result is that ILL requests here have increased 400% in the last three years. At this point, we’re talking about ways to curb the rising costs of interlibrary loan rather than how best to promote it — a scenario inconceivable to the library before we implemented SFX.
There are some great services we can provide our users, but our systems need to be smart about offering those when the user actually needs them, and only when they need them. I think the Innovative XML Server and other web service APIs can provide us the means to offer more dynamic and contextualized services.
August 21st, 2005 at 1:05 pm
I agree. One of the big things I requested in a recent redesign was contextual help. There should be a link to ILL if the book is not available or at least more useful help. I think most of my suggestions were deemed not possible. I think this is where these external services come into play. They really give you the opportunity to integrate your services into the output. I’d like to see the same thing in my OPAC of course.
I posted a little bit about this on my blog relating to something else. Again if you haven’t read it give Defensive Design for the Web a read. Well worth it.