While I was working on compiling all of the survey data from our graduate students, I had what I thought was a crazy idea. The idea came from a common suggestion and complaint from the military history grad students in the surveys. The suggestion was that we provide more eBooks in their subject area. The problem is that the books they tend to want aren’t available in a digital format. While our digital collections do a good job of meeting the needs of most of our online programs, a lot of the stuff our military history students tend to need isn’t online. So we provide a lot of physical books to those students.
The complaint was that it takes too long to get books they request. We can’t do traditional book ILL with our distance learners since they live so far away and the loan times would not be sufficient. So instead, we purchase books (most of what they request, though we have some limits when the book price is high) and mail them to the students with a 3-month loan period. The problem is that the book first has to come to us where we quickly catalog it, barcode it, check it out to the student and send it on. While it may only take a day to do this, sending it to us adds many extra days to the shipping time. It could add as much as a week to the amount of time it takes for the student to receive the book.
So, my idea was to just send the students the books directly from Amazon. I knew there were good reasons not to do this, but I felt that the benefits outweighed any risks. Sometimes, by the time we’re ready to send out the book, the student doesn’t need it anymore. That means we’ve purchased a book for a student that won’t even get used. While we may end up losing some books this way, we’d save money by cutting out that extra shipping step, so it may even out. I’d rather see the books get at least one circ than none and this would allow us to provide a much better service to our students.
The problem is, while this was my idea, the change in the way we did things wouldn’t affect me at all. However, it would have a major effect on the Acquisitions and ILL staff. I felt weird about suggesting something that meant more work for other people. So I tested the waters by talking to our Director and the Coordinator of Technical Services before I actually spoke to the staff I knew it would affect. Our Director was really in favor of our doing anything that will improve the way we provide services. Our Head of Technical Services couldn’t think of any good reason not to try doing it other than the fact that we might lose books and there wouldn’t be a record in our circ system of the students having the books. Certainly not insurmountable problems. So, I called a meeting with the folks involved in ILL and Acquisitions.
The main reason I wanted to write about this is to really give props to my colleagues. No one objected to the idea of trying this model out. There were no objections based on the work it would create for them. Instead of talking about why we couldn’t do it, everyone talked about how we could do it. The only issues people brought up were practical ones (“who would handle ___?”, “how will we ___?”) By the end of that meeting, we had a plan in place for a pilot project that will start in March and a clear workflow that will require a lot of communication, but is do-able. As I said at the meeting, at so many other libraries, an idea like this would have met with so many brick walls. Yes, it helps to be a smaller library, but the ease of pushing this through is a credit to the service-orientation and open-mindedness of my colleagues. I’ve never had an idea of mine dismissed here, which has not been true of other places at which I’ve worked.
Shipping books directly from Amazon to our students isn’t exactly revolutionary, but it will make a big difference here. And the ease of making this change at my library is pretty, well… 2.0. Instead of being stuck on the “this is the way we’ve always done it” mantra, my colleagues were willing to try a new way of serving students based on the feedback we received from them. It may not be as sexy as IM reference, gaming, or tagging in the catalog, but it’s what our users want and I’m pretty excited about how responsive we’re being to their needs.
I’m willing to bet that we do a lot of things at our libraries without realizing how 2.0 (for lack of a better word) they are. We focus so much on the cool social software-y stuff, when often, what our patrons really want has nothing to do with blogs, wikis or Facebook. What have you or your colleagues done at your library that maybe isn’t super-sexy, but really illustrates your/their responsiveness to patron needs?
We eliminated charges for placing holds – it used to be $1 per title. The holds have gone through the roof and the patrons couldn’t be happier.
This is a great idea. It’d be even better, I think, if you ordered the books through your local independent bookstore. If they don’t have it, then through a larger regional indy bookstore. They might even be willing to set up some kind of customized invoicing for Acquisitions and enclose a mailer for the students to return the books back to the library.
Joan, that’s a really neat idea. Not a great fit for us here, but I love the idea of partnering with local businesses whenever possible.
I’m envious. We proposed this idea for our ILL department and they were good to go. I pointed out that, if someone kept the book and we couldn’t get it back, well at least we would have saved the cost of cataloging. Unfortunately our financial officer said that we had to inventory any books we buy. It has something to do with audits.
While we are pretty good about using the phrase ‘just get the lady what she wants’ as our customer service mantra, this is one we couldn’t push through. Guess we’re too big for that. Sigh.
This idea is so simple I’m surprised it isn’t more common. I think it’s great that your colleagues are so supportive of trying new things like this. I’m curious as to how the students will get the books back to your library. Will they have to pay shipping costs out of their own pocket?
Meredith,
Thanks for sharing – especially the parts about strategies to get stakeholders on board, which I’ve found is often the biggest obstacle to implementing change like this.
Being a distance learning college with no physical library (we have a large online collection but very small library staff) within a large State University system, we are currently piloting a similar project – partnering with one of the larger universities in the state: we pay them for ILL access to their collections.
In the case of books that our partner University doesn’t have, they have the option, if it meets a need in their own collection, to purchase it via Amazon and that book then gets delivered directly to our student/faculty at their home address. The University follows up by sending a postage paid return envelope so the book will be returned to them for cataloging into their collection.
It sounds weird, because we are basically paying another college to help build their own collection – but it meets a pressing need on our end. The response so far has been overwhelmingly positive and the costs in funds and time for us manageable.
Eric, the students have always had to pay return postage here when they get books mailed to them. We normally send a return address label with the package, but I just created a PDF that they can print, cut out, and stick on the package. I’m not sure when or why that decision was made; definitely before my time here. I’ve never heard a student complain about it, which is interesting to me, and the number of students requesting books just keeps going up, so I guess they don’t really see it as an issue. That is interesting that they don’t though. They do complain a lot about the time it takes to get stuff though.
Dana, that’s a very interesting model for providing services. Do you have to pay the entire cost for the Amazon books? While it has been expensive for us to buy all these books for our distance learners, it’s also benefited our collection greatly in some areas. Seems like if the other University is benefiting in some way, you shouldn’t have to foot the entire bill. But I totally understand your position and it’s a great, user-centered service model.
Meredith,
I’m not directly involved in the finances for this, but I believe we pay for the Amazon books (which is a small percentage of books our users request), for shipping and for student interns on their end to process requests. However, there is no direct cost to us to process, store or manage these materials in the long term or for the materials already in their collection so we view it so far as a worthwhile project (it’s still a pilot project afterall). Whether this model is sustainable in the long run has yet to be determined.
Meredith,
I think that there is a key issue here aside from the fact you have fellow staff members willing to look into new procedures. Unlike many 2.0 initiatives you read about on the blogs, you had a concrete problem with current library users.
This isn’t the “we need to be on Facebook/Meebo/Flickr/Wiki because studies show we could get these new users…” sort of approach that often meets with push-back. This was “Our users have specifically asked for X which we currently cannot provide…let’s try to provide X by doing Y.”
The 2.0 initiatives I’ve undertaken at my job that have met with the most support are the ones that I can relate to a current problem, as opposed to the projects that *I* know will improve a services that no one’s currently complaining about.
I think you should also factor in that your colleagues most likely have seen you in action and are willing to listen! 🙂
Meredith,
Really glad that you shared this. I’m working on a big project of reexamining ILL and we have Regional Academic Center students at different locations and we do ILL for them. We get them articles quickly, but books…not so good. So this was just the type of idea I was looking for.
Thanks for sharing!