In March 2006, inCite published a paper by Margaret Hyland entitled "ACT Public Library Information Services". Based on the belief expressed by Hyland that "The underpinning philosophy of online services at the ACT Public Library is that online customers should be able to do anything that can be done by a customer in a library branch." the paper listed various benefits expected by the implementation of an online based service for the ACT Public Library.
Some of these benefits are discussed below.
There was a push for increased empowerment of the clients to take charge of their own transactions. Automation of the reservation process made it much more efficient for clients the placing and collection of reservations. This resulted in much quicker delivery for clients, often receiving the item within one or two days of the order.
Broadening of geographic area covered by the library. No longer solely the ACT and surrounding area, the library was accessible to a wider region through its website. Also the addition of the AskNow! reference service was utilised (using library staff) by clients over the country.
As Margaret wrote "Online service delivery has significantly altered staff workloads". As a former staff member of the ACT library service at the time of the publication of this paper, I can attest that this did occur. The increase of communication between the staff and clients increased the amount of comments to the library especially with regard to purchase suggestions. This, a short-term negative (increased workload for staff), turned to a long term positive. The collection development policy was re-evaluated to consider these suggestions for material. The process took a lengthy period of time but has resulted in the implementation of a substantially more ‘community relevant’ collection policy. This increased our collection of useful material for the population we served, and therefore our chance of providing exact information was increased.
Hyland also mentions the outsourcing of library processing to other areas, for example the Customer Information Centre (or "call centre"). Introduced for a variety of reasons, but significantly to reduce the amount of client record work by staff in branches, the CIC was successful in directing tasks to a core group of staff. This not only freed branch staff to deal with other issues, it also had the effect of improving the level of service for the basic maintenance tasks, due to the staff being more experienced in the execution of them.
The ACT Library continues to develop programs to increase their level of service delivery.
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1 comment:
Well said.
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