1. Transforming Library Services through Staff Engagement
Kathleen F Bauer
Director, Collections, Discovery and Access
Trinity College Information Services
Good morning everyone. My name is Katie Bauer and I work in information Services at Trinity College in Hartford. I’ve been there for two and a half years, and I oversee library operations including the Access Services (circulation) Desk, Interlibrary Loan, online interfaces, collections, metadata services, cataloging and acquisitions. Before Trinity I was various positions at Yale University for 17 years.
The staff I manage at Trinity have had to navigate a shifting landscape as we’ve moved to a more digital library, with new job duties and shrinking staff. If you ask them they will tell you that they want to provide outstanding service to Trinity, and they believe, I think we all do, that they do excellent work. What I will talk with you about this morning are efforts I’ve made to engage staff in defining what excellent service looks like, to translate that into goals, and then to give them data to measure how well they’ve met those goals.

2. Today’s Talk Background on environment at Trinity College,
Describe experience having staff set service expectations,
Explain data gathering for one specific service measure, the time needed to process reserves, and
Staff reactions to this process.

3. Background Merged IT and Library organization
Active consortium for sharing materials--CTW
Implemented a new library management system one year ago-- Alma
85% digital collection spending

4. Access&Technical Services Staff
Marcelino Velez
Patron Services Rep
Amy Rua
Patron Services Rep
Chris Devanney
Technical
Services Rep
Rose Beranis
Lead Patron Services Rep
Julie Styles
Access Services Librarian
Jose Pena
Technical
Services Rep
As we moved to eresources and purchased less print, over time we needed less staff to process print and so the Technical Services department staff size shrunk over time. One year ago we collocated 12 people from Technical Services and Access Services (circulation). They are collocated but still have two separate lead librarians, so are still fairly autonomous. We slightly changed titles, but a lot of work stayed divided in the same ways it had been in past.
Staff moved into one fairly large work space.
Amanda Gustason
Patron Services Rep
Bronzell Dinkins
Lead Technical
Services Rep
Gretchen Ide
Patron Services Rep
Charles Rua
Technical Services Rep
Todd Falkowski
Cataloging Librarian

5. Putting Metrics in Staff Hands
CTW book loaning—one of our most popular services
We report annually how many books are shipped between Trinity and CTW
Did not regularly gather data on how long it took.
Time from request to receipt
Trinity to Connecticut: 4 days
Trinity to Wesleyan: 4 days
Connecticut to Wesleyan: 2 days
Typically staff have not worked with metrics about services.
Ex. About a year and a half ago complaints surfaced from CTW about how long it took books to ship to them from Trinity.
We different have an actual measure of the time, but when we were able to generate some reports we found that it took
twice as long to ship a book between Trinity and Connecticut College and Trinity and Wesleyan as it took to ship books between Connecticut and Wesleyan
Once we had these data in hand we were able to discuss with staff the process for picking up CTW books. It turned out that we did not have a direct mail pick up. Mail was sent to a central location on campus, and from there were picked up by UPS. That two step process was causing us to often miss the UPS pick up.
Staff were providing service, but they were not getting much feedback on things like time to deliver service, or customer satisfaction.
After this we wanted to work on making sure that we identified important services and saw to it that staff got data about how the service was being delivered.

6. Wanted to Set Service Expectations and Associated Metrics
First Asked Staff to Brainstorm
• Staff should be ready to assist, and that should be obvious to the patron
• Fast Service
• First impressions matter
• Leaving with “something”/”more”/”being helped”
• Feel good experience
• Fit the patron’s needs
Using this experience, we wanted to involve staff more in understanding services and service expectations. We got together and discussed what makes a good customer interaction and asked “how do you want patrons to think of this library” Asked them to think how they like to be treated.
We focused on the physical library, and really focused on our desk. The desk remains a key interaction point for our students and faculty.

7. Staff Set Patron-Centric Service Vision
Patrons leave an interaction feeling helped
Patrons find the library service desk is welcoming
Patrons get correct answers to questions
Patrons get materials quickly
Came up with a set of patron focused statements
Helpfulness
Friendliness
Knowledge
Efficiency

8. Efficiency Speedy Getting in touch with a librarian in reasonable time
Shelving and Shelf reading
Organization
Filling requests
Reserves / Trinity / CTW / ILL
Data: # of requests
Staff, not surprisingly, said that our patrons want things fast, and they need to be efficient. This is an area where it seemed that we could probably get automated data on how fast we do things, from our library management system Alma, which we use for all processing and borrowing.

9. Patrons Get Materials Quickly--Efficiency
Goals
Material is paged and ready to be picked up within two hours.
Reserves are ready within two days from the time of request.
Patrons Get Materials Quickly--Efficiency
Goal Setting
SMART
Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timely
Wanted quantifiable goals that were attainable but not too easy.
Admit that this goal setting was imposed by me. We talked about it at the visioning exercise, but I imposed it. There was a lot of push back from staff.
Remove fear of retribution
I will admit that I pushed numeric goals and staff didn’t want them. There was quite a bit of pushback.
I said it would be an experiment for this spring semester. We would use this as an opportunity to gather data and judge how realistic these goals were and we could rethink them at the end of the semester.
I’m going to report on the third goad here which is that reserves are ready within two days from the time of request.

10. Discussion Have you done a similar exercise with staff?
What is the attitude to setting numeric goals?
How much control should staff have on choosing the goal?
Discussion

11. Our reserve services include traditional print books and videos which we digitize and stream on a service called Trinflix
We do not yet digitize book chapters or articles,
We use our LMS, Alma, to process and make reserves available.
Reserves

12. Reserves Spring 2018 by Format
Total for fall and spring is 2843
Most ebook use is not through reserves. This is also true of streaming video users can access directly from Kanopy and films on demand

13. Anatomy of a Reserve – Patron Submits Request
Web form, separate from our ALMA system

14. Reserves—Staff Create Citation in Alma
Staff have to enter the citation in Alma. Alma is prepopulated with every course through an automated feed, and staff need to first create a reading list for a specific course. Then citations are added to the reading list.

15. Anatomy of a reserve request—get the item
Sometimes this means pulling from the shelf, sometimes we need to purchase the item
If a purchase, access services staff would send an to technical services staff.
In either case, in Alma the last step is that the item is moved to a temporary location of Circ reserve, and you’ll see this is important to the data gathering.

16. Data Collection Plan—Alma Reserve Citation Report
Course Name
Date and Time Created
Item Title
Status
Format
Cur Iss: Localism/States Rights
1/12/ :53:08 AM
Activists in City Hall the progressive response to the Reagan era in Boston and Chicago /
Complete
Physical Book
1/12/ :57:29 AM
The perils of federalism : race, poverty, and the politics of crime control /
1/23/2018 8:24:14 PM
City Power
Being Prepared
Data Structures & Algorithms
1/23/2018 3:31:25 PM
Data structures and algorithms in Java /
Easy to create report, you can see the name of the course, date and time the citation was created, title, format, whether it is done or not.
This report does not include when the item goes to the shelf.

17. Data Collection Plan—Alma Physical Item Location Report
Active Course Code
Title
Event Start Date and Time
Temporary Location Code
FILM SPRING-01
I, Tonya /
3/15/ :41:36 PM
circ-resv
BNAR SPRING-01
Bolivia /
3/14/ :50:42 AM
XXY /
3/14/ :49:53 AM
Infancia clandestina /
3/14/ :48:50 AM
HIST SPRING-01; URST SPRING-01
Chun guang zha xie /
3/14/ :34:55 AM
A different report give physical item status. We can find things that have been moved to the temporary location of circulation reserves.
Data tells me when the item was processed and ready to check out from reserves, It doesn’t tell me what is waiting to go on reserves, nor does it tell me how long to process the item because it is not linked to the start time for the citation.

18. Data Analysis — Combined Reports
Title
Citation Create Date
Citation Status
Date on Shelf
Time in Days
Open city
1/19/18 9:08 AM
Complete
1/22/18 4:45 PM
3.3
The Matrix
1/31/18 3:35 PM
2/3/18 9:16 PM
3.2
Inception
1/31/18 3:36 PM
2/3/18 9:17 PM
Secret of the wild child
2/6/18 12:14 PM
2/9/18 5:26 PM
La cage aux folles
1/19/18 2:38 PM
1/22/18 4:54 PM
3.1
Did combination by exporting to Excel and Match on title. Use the difference between when the item went to the shelf, and when the citation was started, to give you the processing time in days, which is what we needed to understand how we were doing in comparison to the stated 2 day goal.
This is a manual and fairly time consuming process. If a single Alma report, it would be easy to automate a daily report and have it be part of staff Alma desktop.

19. Have you done this type of data gathering and data analysis?
Who does the work and how do they distribute results?
Was the time and effort worth it?
Discussion

20. Sharing the Data with Staff—Problem Report
Title
Course Code
Resource Type
Citation Create Date
Citation Status
Date on shelf
Today's date
Time in Days
QUE HORAS ELA VOLTA?
PORT SPRING
Book - Physical
2/4/2018 5:42:49 PM
Being Prepared
#N/A
3/16/2018 39
El velorio : no vela = Martorell's wake
HISP SPRING
2/4/2018 8:30:44 PM
Glengarry Glen Ross : a play
FILM SPRING
2/9/ :35:54 PM 35
Children of men
Projected medium - Physical
2/9/ :39:22 PM
My Love Affair with the Brain
NESC SPRING
2/13/2018 9:31:05 PM 31
More interesting during the semester to run the report a couple of times a week and look for items still “being prepared” By adding today’s date and figuring the difference we could easily see how long items were waiting.
This process helped us to find trouble spots.

21. Making Changes Problem Resolutions
We uncovered issues where things were processed and available, but we might have missed a step in Alma. That was more than a data issue, it usually caused the public record to be wrong.
Report showed things waiting a full month or more. We often found these really slow processes had to do with needing to buy the material. Now, be aware that for many items we buy we should be able to use our Amazon Prime account and get things within two days.
But what we found was that

22. Making Changes Marcelino Velez Patron Services Rep Amy Rua
Rose Beranis
Lead Patron Services Rep
Chris Devanney
Technical
Services Rep
Julie Styles
Access Services Librarian
Jose Pena
Technical
Services Rep
we had people from Access Services working really closely together on reserves and they communicate. But when we need to buy material they had to work with Acquisitions staff, and there was almost no communication there.
Sometimes the acquisitions staff weren’t getting enough information to make the purchase
We found that the two processes were working in ways that the two groups didn’t understand or expect. There was no check back on things that didn’t come in
We have Alma configured so that Tech Services and Circulation are separate work groups, and this creates separate work flows.
This is an area we need to work on—
Idea to form a slightly different work group for handling patron requests
Communication
Within Alma itself we could merge what are two separate work units into one Circulation--Acquisitions
Gretchen Ide
Patron Services Rep
Bronzell Dinkins
Lead Technical
Services Rep
Charles Rua
Technical Services Rep
Amanda Gustason
Patron Services Rep
Todd Falkowski
Cataloging Librarian

23. Goal was to complete a request in 2 days, actual average was 3.4 days
Met goal 63% 
Took 5 days or less to complete the reserve 82%
Between 6 and 13 days 9%
14 or more days 8%
How We Measured Up to the Goal that Reserves Would be Processed in Two Days
I think the process of working through our problem cases produced the most insight, but we did start with saying here’s our goal of 2 days to process, so recently shared the overall performance since start of the semester.

24. Staff responses to the goal “Filling reserve requests within two days
Asked staff what they thought about doing this goal setting and data gathering.
Gave a brief survey with a 4 point likert scale strongly agree to strongly disagree

25. Do you think we should share the time needed to fill reserves publicly?
Unified in being against sharing

26. What We Learned
How important is it to meet a numeric goal? Does tension exist between a group having a friendly environment for patrons and also having a commitment to hitting a numeric goal?
Now that we have experience and data we could definitely revise the goal and make the number of days needed to fill reserves something that we track and report to staff weekly. I have started to wonder how much to push the idea of numeric goals. Is it too much like factory work.
Process of examing time to fill a request, and having staff work through the issues was the most helpful part of this, because they were responsible for troubleshooting and determining where we had problems.
They are helping to set new workflows that are designed to deal with issues, especially around purchasing.

27. Preliminary Conclusions
Value the process more than the goal,
Continue biweekly problem reports,
Share average time to fill requests with staff, and
Work on communication and Alma configuration.
We know we can run a simple report that will tell us how many are completed or in process and how long citation has been outstanding
We will change some processing, and emphasize how we buy material for reserves
Staff sometimes tried to change dates items started by creating a new record
Is is worthwhile to add steps that help record keeping but add some time to process
Is there value in tracking the goal number
Better to focus on the process
Should we choose benchmarks
Does it motivate staff?

28. Discussion How important is the goal itself?
Should we be committed to transparency in reporting benchmarks to patrons?
Would sharing benchmarks between institutions make them more useful?
Discussion

29. Questions or comments?
Now what