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6023 results in Facet Publishing

Page 250 of 302

  • 6 - Making the most of knowing your users

  • Sheila Pantry, Peter Griffiths
  • Book:
    How to Give Your Users the LIS Services They Want
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2009, pp 73-86

  • Summary

    This chapter looks at how you can improve your strategic planning through analysis of user behaviour by:

  • ➡ making the link to strategic planning

  • ➡ better marketing

  • ➡ keeping the customers satisfied

  • ➡ keeping upstream management satisfied

  • ➡ making sure that your organization recognizes the importance of its library and information service

  • ➡ communications

  • ➡ achieving cost benefits and making better use of budgets.

    • Better strategic planning through analysis of user behaviour

    Library and information services do not operate in ‘steady state’. They are – or should be – central to every organization irrespective of the field of activity (or ‘sector’ – by which we mean categories like academic, governmental, workplace, public, legal, financial, technical, scientific or medical). In order to remain in that central role they need constantly to be assessed, evaluated and monitored.

    Making the link to strategic planning

    It will be part of your strategic planning processes for the LIS to check for and evaluate the many new and competing services and products that constantly arrive on the scene. You should recognize that this is also part of your organization's strategic planning process, so user requirements should be kept in mind as part of your planning and evaluation processes. How can this be done?

    Marketing is one way (and we discuss this in a moment) but it's also important to make the leaders of your user community aware of the assumptions or decisions you have made, and to share the information with them. This can be done succinctly – you have no need to go into every detail. In this way you can be sure that these decision makers have a summary of your evidence in front of them, and could ask for further information about particular issues of concern.

    It is not among the main aims of this book to provide detailed guidance on the processes of strategic planning for libraries but there are a number of texts that provide further information (such as Corrall 2000 and 2003 or the documents on the web indexed from LibrarySupportStaff.com at www.librarysupportstaff.com/strategicplan. html).

  • 8 - Tracking the future

  • Sheila Pantry, Peter Griffiths
  • Book:
    How to Give Your Users the LIS Services They Want
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2009, pp 97-118

  • Summary

    In this chapter we look at some ways and methods of tracking the future, keeping ahead of the competition and anticipating your users’ needs, by:

    ➡ keeping a watch on the wider changing world

    ➡ thinking about your networks – what can they tell you?

  • — people

  • — management networks

  • — technical networks

    • ➡ learning lessons

    ➡ changing customers’ requirements

    ➡ making friends – what the suppliers are offering – both electronic and print sources

    ➡ making use of new ways of working and partnerships.

    Keeping a watch on the wider changing world

    It is essential to keep a very watchful eye on the wider changing world. What often develops in a different sector, e.g. retail, may be taken as the norm and expected in the information sector. As we have already seen, knowing your users and helping them to define their needs is one of the main ingredients that will achieve success in keeping at least one step ahead of their information demands. This is especially important when creating electronic information services, since the ready availability of e-services may mean that your users keep their requirements to themselves under the impression that they can get everything from the web or from desktop information services.

    One of the other main ingredients for success is knowing what your users are planning – how they are going to demand products and services in future. These will have such an impact on the services that you are currently offering that your own customers may decide to take up the competitors’ service. For example, if you are offering services to a specific group of users such as a research group and you wish to offer e-journals instead of paper-based services, you may find that the e-journal subscription agents decide to contact the research group directly. There is no real reason, if they receive a sufficiently cost-effective offer, why the research group should not take this offer up. They may feel that they would be in control of their own budget and of their choice of journals without having to deal with a third party – your information service.

  • 5 - Using information about past user behaviour

  • Sheila Pantry, Peter Griffiths
  • Book:
    How to Give Your Users the LIS Services They Want
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2009, pp 61-72

  • Summary

    In this chapter we look at:

  • ➡ the value of information about past user behaviour

  • ➡ the content of library surveys, and how this influences the way that users respond

  • ➡ what the results of your information audit may tell you about user needs

  • ➡ how to use the results of surveys to adjust services

  • ➡ how to use the results of surveys to decide whether to close services or create new ones

  • ➡ the value of information over time.

    • The value of information about past user behaviour

    What information do you already hold about your users and what can you learn from it? Past behaviour is no guarantee of future behaviour, of course, so is it worth keeping old data? There may be changes in the size or composition of your user group, and older reviews are unlikely to cover some of the services your LIS now offers, just as they may include some services that have since closed. Historic data will of course allow you to paint a picture over time of how the LIS is used, and how users regard it and its services, allowing you to track trends and comparative figures to support business cases and help with fund allocation. But there is also great value in reading the detail, because of what it tells you about the way that users have interpreted the questions put to them. You may be able not only to identify areas where jargon or lack of understanding is confusing your users (and maybe dissuading them from asking the LIS to provide a new service you would like to offer) but also gain understanding about the way that your users work and how they involve the LIS in that work.

    An important byproduct of reviewing what you already know will be to highlight other information stores in your organization, and this may lead you to consider whether these should be brought within your library and information service, or whether you should influence their management in any other appropriate ways.

    Library surveys

    Do you issue library surveys? Many libraries do, not only to discover what users require, but in order to decide what services to provide and in order to allocate budgets to them.

  • 6 - Archiving the queer and queering the archives: a case study of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (CLGA)

  • from Part 3 - Records loss, destruction and recovery
  • Edited by Jeannette A. Bastian, Ben Alexander
  • Book:
    Community Archives
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2009, pp 97-108

  • Summary

    As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excite me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm an identity I was unhappily piecing together.

    Edmund White, Out of the Closet, on the Bookshelf (Kester, 1997, 121)

    Introduction

    In 1987 Canadian sociologist Gary Kinsman published a landmark study titled The Regulation of Desire – Sexuality in Canada. It is widely considered to be the first critical examination of the history of homosexuality in Canada, or, in Kinsman's own words, an ‘excursion towards a queer history of Canada’ (1987, 65). In outlining his research methodology, Kinsman acknowledges a problem with sources and interpretation:

    Because of the socially organized ‘private’ or ‘personal’ character of intimate sexual relations there has been little public record of same-gender sex aside from the ‘deviant’ or ‘criminal’ behaviour found in police records, government reports, newspaper articles, medical and psychiatric discourse, and sex advice literature. Since same-gender eroticism was stigmatized, historically valuable diaries and letters have not been preserved. The voices of those people engaged in same-gender sex have thereby been silenced.

    Kinsman, 1987, 66

    Kinsman concludes that, given the absence of personal records, researchers interested in queer studies in Canada have often had to rely on the evidential value of public records, which necessarily document only the official version of this issue. Researchers have thus had to read the records ‘against the grain’ in order to grasp some sense of the everyday lives of queer Canadians in the past. The focus that public archives had placed on records that describe individual homosexual acts as criminal offences necessarily excluded from the archival fold any records that spoke of a community of people marginalized by the sexual policies of the state. What Kinsman strongly implies is that traditional archival institutions in Canada have not been accountable to queer people and to researchers interested in the historical construction of sexuality.

    Same-gender sexual activity in Canada, as in most Western democracies, had almost always been prosecuted by the state, condemned by the Church and pathologized by science. The situation remained more or less the same until the 1960s, when the emerging civil rights movement began to foster a growing social awareness of homosexuals as a disenfranchised and marginalized group of people.

  • 2 - Understanding users – the what, why, where, when, how and who

  • Sheila Pantry, Peter Griffiths
  • Book:
    How to Give Your Users the LIS Services They Want
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2009, pp 13-32

  • Summary

    In this chapter we look at:

  • ➡ the services users need or should have?

  • ➡ why we need to know about our users and their behaviour

  • ➡ where users are and how this affects their ideas of good service

  • ➡ when to talk to users about their information needs

  • ➡ how users obtain information and how to assess these ways

  • ➡ who you need to consider when planning and performing the audit – managers are customers too.

  • ➡ and finally – what next?

    • In order to get a deeper understanding of user behaviour in your LIS, we suggest that you answer a series of questions designed to examine the way that your users access and make use of information resources.

    What services do LIS users need, and what should they have?

    The users of an LIS as well as its managers and staff have a role to play in delivering a service, but often they are unaware of this and the service does not tell them about this role. This is what users should do to ensure that they get the best from their LIS:

  • • be aware of what the library and information service offers

  • • identify their information needs

  • • agree to take those needs to the LIS as first port of call

  • • communicate them to the information service staff and discuss them as required

  • • give feedback to the information service

  • • keep information service staff aware of their changing subject interests

  • • involve the information service in projects that have information implications.

    • This may seem easiest in an organization that has its own library, such as a university or a business, but it should be possible with a little thought to apply these criteria to all types of service. At the end of the day it is the user who really decides the quality of the services, by:

  • • making demands for improvements on an existing service

  • • asking for new services

  • • showing a willingness to co-operate.

    • However, it is not very reasonable to expect users to do this by themselves, so they may need help to describe what they need, and to contribute more generally to developing information services to suit their requirements.

  • 13 - Always queer, always here: creating the Black Gay and Lesbian Archive in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

  • from Part 5 - Building a community archive
    • By Steven G. Fullwood, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library
  • Edited by Jeannette A. Bastian, Ben Alexander
  • Book:
    Community Archives
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2009, pp 235-250

  • Summary

    Introduction

    In the fall of 2007 a young New York University student named Sarah visited the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to view materials in the Black Gay and Lesbian Archive (BGLA), a project I founded a decade ago to aid in the preservation of Black queer culture and history. As I placed several boxes on the table before her, Sarah's beautiful brown face lit up like sunshine. She was ecstatic about sifting through the stacks of Black queer books of various genres dating from the mid-1970s to the present.

    ‘My brother and I were talking earlier about there being no Black gay culture. That there were only a few Black gay writers like James Baldwin and E. Lynn Harris’, she said beaming. Watching as she handled the books, opening and reading parts, her eyes large and smile broad, I shared her enthusiasm. Through Sarah's experience, I recognized myself, small and yearning, recalling that itch for knowledge about Black queerness that became the impetus for the formation and development of the Black Gay and Lesbian Archive.

    Behind the archive

    Toledo, Ohio, circa 1982. Much like any other black Midwesterner, I was born to working-class people who were products of a post-industrial town in a post-Civil Rights moment. My parents sought to raise children who would live better than they did. Racial equality trumped gay and lesbian rights. The Black Power and the Black Arts movements dictated the clothes we wore, the way we talked, the movies we saw, and even what we read. Most Black communities dealt primarily with achieving civil rights and upward mobility. By contrast, the reality of gay and lesbian life and culture was complicated. Since everyone knew somebody who was or suspected to be ‘that way’, homosexuality was tolerated in some sense. There were no specific neighbourhoods for Black queer people because Black people could not afford to, or did not want to, live away from other Black people. Neighbourhoods, schools and churches and anywhere else Black heterosexuals lived, learned or prayed, homosexuals were there, and they too lived, if quietly.

    As a teenager, my thirst for a language to describe what I thought I was or at least was becoming ravaged my consciousness.

  • 5 - We are our memories: community and records in Fiji

  • from Part 2 - Communities and non-traditional record keeping
  • Edited by Jeannette A. Bastian, Ben Alexander
  • Book:
    Community Archives
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2009, pp 87-94

  • Summary

    Fiji is a Pacific nation of 330 islands (a quarter of which are inhabited) lying at the heart of the ‘South Pacific’ midway between the equator and the South Pole. It has a population approaching 900,000 people, and archaeological evidence has established that the group of islands was probably first settled around three and a half thousand years ago (Yaqona, 2004, 10–11). As with most other former colonies, change has been a constant theme for our nation. The idea of nationhood is itself relatively new, unlike countries such as China, Japan, France or Egypt, which have a long and colourful record of nationhood.

    We in Fiji, on the other hand, were originally a collection of variously structured kin groups headed by chiefs who contested for predominance within their immediate areas. The more successful chiefs sought to extend their power and influence as far as possible.

    After a number of failed attempts at centralized government, and under the growing threat of increasingly disruptive elements within the settler community, the leading chiefs of the time decided to cede Fiji to Britain and on 10 October 1874 Fiji became a crown colony of Britain (Lal, 1992, 10–11). A mere 96 years later, on 10 October 1970, after considerable growing pains and earnest dialogue among Fiji's communities and the British, Fiji became an independent nation.

    For the last 150 years, the people of Fiji have had to deal with great waves of change, and challenge. This becomes especially clear when dealing with issues such as culture, identity and what seems to be competing perceptions of knowledge. Against this backdrop archives and records managers are struggling to implement relevant, effective record-keeping systems in a society that is losing parts of its traditional heritage, and is not yet convinced of the need to manage records over time. What then are the challenges to retaining our memory? What role do archives play? And where do we go from here?

    Oral tradition is the synthesis and transmission of knowledge and histories in a community from one generation to the next. The approach is not about ‘data’ or ‘facts’ that are captured in the ‘formal record-keeping environment’, but rather it is a knowing which comes from doing and sharing.

  • 9 - From Yizkor Books to weblogs: genocide, grassroots documentation and new technologies

  • from Part 4 - Online communities: how technology brings communities and their records together
    • By András Riedlmayer, University of Chicago (BA, history), Princeton University (MA, near Eastern studies) and Simmons College (MS, library and information science), Stephen Naron, Stockholm, Sweden
  • Edited by Jeannette A. Bastian, Ben Alexander
  • Book:
    Community Archives
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2009, pp 151-168

  • Summary

    Introduction

    In the aftermath of World War 1, the journalist Aram Antonean, a survivor of the Armenian genocide of 1915–16, collected testimony from other survivors and published it, along with photographs and other documents, in a book entitled Mets ochire [The Great Crime] (Antonean, 1921). Antonean, and others, recognized the urgent necessity of capturing these stories. In the introduction to his book, he wrote: ‘Many times, I thought that a volume needs to be written for each [survivor] in order to encompass, at least in a schematic way, the overall picture of the terrible horrors. And there were a hundred thousand of these survivors, each one of whom had a story to fill a volume’ (Slyomovics, 1998, 4).

    By telling their stories, these survivors added their ‘volume’ to a collective effort to defy the attempt to efface their people, the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire, from history. Of course, Antonean realized that this effort, important as it was, was destined to be incomplete. Presaging David Boder's interviews1 with survivors of the Holocaust decades later, Antonean knew that the ‘colossal endeavor would still fall short of the stories of those who had perished, taking with them more than a million volumes’ (Slyomovics, 1998, 4) Sadly, this dynamic of destruction and communal reconstruction would not end with the Armenian genocide. In fact, it was an omen of things to come. Genocide and forced exile has been the 20th century's terrible and consistent companion. But despite the staggering loss of human lives and cultural heritage, communities of survivors – bound by ethnic, religious and social relations – have found remarkable ways to collectively reconstruct and remember what was lost. And despite the unique contexts and circumstances of each genocide or persecution, the survivors’ responses are similar in substance and aim. Of course, communal commemoration of the dead and of victims of national tragedy is nothing new – its visible signs, from ancient burial grounds to national war memorials to today's high-tech memorial museums and hyperlinked online documentation centres, are all around us. But each group of survivors, each generation, reinvents the process by which their lost community is commemorated. And in doing so, survivors employ those technologies most prevalent at the time.

  • 1 - Why this book?

  • Sheila Pantry, Peter Griffiths
  • Book:
    How to Give Your Users the LIS Services They Want
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2009, pp 1-12

  • Summary

    In these turbulent times, library and information service (LIS) staff at all levels need constantly to keep one step, or more, ahead of the users.

    Today's LIS users do not behave like those who used the services ten or twenty years ago, and today's user behaviour will change again, probably even more rapidly than we have seen in recent years. Having the strategies to deal with this is not just an issue for senior managers and the leaders of the profession. Nor is it just an issue for the public library sector. It is an issue for every type of library, and for library and information professionals at every level – and in every country.

    While we recognize that nothing stands still in this information world of ours, we believe that the focus of all our attention remains (and always has been) the user. Without users there is no real reason for a library and information service to exist. Experience will give the manager an advantage – but do we need to get older to be able to assess and forecast what the users will do next as far as information searching, retrieval and subsequent usage of the data is concerned? LISs worldwide spend enormous sums of money on staff, purchasing services, materials and other systems, but do they really understand what exactly makes the user tick?

    In recent years many ideas, often from other sectors, have taken off and been exploited in new and exciting ways. They are being communicated in real time to world wide audiences. Many new applications are being developed quickly on the back of this for services such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Google Maps. Major trends are emerging and converging, such as Twittering and mash-ups, conversations and open linked data. And at last the semantic web is becoming a reality as more organizations publish their data in open formats that these new tools can access and exploit creatively across the web. Everyone in the marketplace can participate, including publishers, library and information centres and users. Many people who never entered an LIS are participating and the information world of ours must shift its dynamics to embrace these new types of users. The barriers to entry are minimal – the costs of participating zero.

  • 2 - Special, local and about us: the development of community archives in Britain

  • from Part 1 - A community archives model
  • Edited by Jeannette A. Bastian, Ben Alexander
  • Book:
    Community Archives
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2009, pp 29-46

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Community archives in the UK encompass collecting activities that trace their roots back to the 19th century. At the same time, these archives have also been shaped by the ways in which the concept of community has been interpreted and applied by local and national governments as well as by a wide range of non-profit agencies. In some towns and counties, collecting at a local level predated the establishment of formal collections; in others, voluntary bodies helped form those institutions. In more remote areas, collecting began as a result of the distance from a local government collecting body's base, inadequacies in the policies or activities of those collecting bodies, or suspicions that the collecting body was not a suitable repository for holding particular kinds of source material. This article explores the growth of community archives and community collections in the UK through a range of voluntary bodies; the interactions among mainstream archives, libraries, and museums; and, as a result of those interactions, the creation of a body that seeks to act as a forum for community archives and all who are active in working for and with them.

    The development of community collecting

    Collecting records at a local level has a long history in England. Formal repositories in counties grew out of the need to house and preserve the court records from ‘quarter sessions’, which before 1888 constituted the local government of each county. It was not until 1926 that Bedfordshire, a county north of London, became the first record office in the country to take in records from corporate bodies and individuals to add to the historic official holdings. The creation of public libraries in the 19th century also provided stimulus for the preservation of local records, including what came to be defined as ephemera (posters, theatre programmes, sale catalogues) and photographs. Regional and local societies built up their own holdings while local voluntary activity contributed to the growth of formal record holding bodies.

    In the town of Walthamstow, for example, a public library service was created in the 1890s, and the second borough librarian, G. E. Roebuck, acquired records of local institutions, title deeds and manorial records, which he housed in the library.

  • 9 - Future perfect?

  • Sheila Pantry, Peter Griffiths
  • Book:
    How to Give Your Users the LIS Services They Want
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2009, pp 119-136

  • Summary

    In this final chapter we look at what could really make a difference in the future:

  • ➡ some recommendations

  • ➡ a possible patron?

  • ➡ politics

  • ➡ the library as place

  • ➡ shh, this is a digital library

  • ➡ shaping a modern library

  • ➡ challenges for the future.

    • Throughout the book we have identified many actions that can be done to give your users the LIS they want. There are challenges and opportunities that can be taken up to rethink creatively and take the initiative in getting the users to articulate what they need, keep the dialogue open with them and set the pace. You have access to all the information you need to keep ahead of the game if you want!

    Some recommendations

    When the contributors in Digital Consumers (Nicholas and Rowlands, 2008) were asked to each provide one suggestion as what should be a priority when offering services to users they came up with the following in order of priority:

  • 1 Live with the prospect of constant change.

  • 2 Establish a link with information provisions and access/outcomes.

  • 3 Keep it simple.

  • 4 Do not be seduced by digital fashions, they will all disappear.

  • 5 Get social.

  • 6 Hold on to physical space.

    • Information people will be pleased to know that no one said ‘the last one out turn the lights off ‘, although a few were close to saying this.

    A number of recommendations for libraries are suggested by Thomas Frey of The DaVinci Institute who says of the future (Frey, 2006): ‘libraries are in a unique position. Since most people have fond memories of their times growing up in libraries, and there are no real “library hater” organizations, most libraries have the luxury of time to reinvent themselves.’ He agrees with us that the role of a library within a community is changing and most of all the way people are interacting with the LIS and the services offered are also changing. The best advice is to enjoy the journey and relish in the wonderment of what tomorrow may bring and continue to accept the challenges and changes.

  • 4 - Great expectations: how LIS professionals can manage and train users

  • Sheila Pantry, Peter Griffiths
  • Book:
    How to Give Your Users the LIS Services They Want
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2009, pp 45-60

  • Summary

    In this chapter we discuss:

  • ➡ how to manage users of the service

  • ➡ levels of expectations

  • ➡ the role of the information professional

  • ➡ user training.

    • In the previous chapter we took a general look at how the nature of library use has been changing, and in particular the impact of the generation known by labels such as ‘Digital Natives’, ‘Gen-Y’ and the ‘Google Generation’. Now we examine issues in more depth, looking at the changes in the way this generation uses the services we offer, and the new issues this raises for LIS managers.

    Managing users of the service Access

    Libraries have long been used to receiving enquiries by telephone and letter, and to dealing with customers beyond the physical building. The professional judgement of reference staff has ensured that the customer has received the most appropriate material to meet the enquiry based on the customer's request and the amount of detail available to refine the enquiry. This remote form of reference interview has served to identify the most suitable materials where the remote customer has been unable to access or assess it.

    The widespread development of e-library services has radically changed this model. Using e-services, customers can now view materials online, and select the most useful publications for their purpose. But they can also bypass professional intervention altogether, and run the risk of failing to find all the available materials, perhaps because of failures of their search strategies, or perhaps because their lack of subject knowledge did not alert them to the absence of particular documents. They may well be unaware of relevant resources that are missing from their electronic repository (including of course those that remain only in print-on-paper format).

    Identifying authorized users

    In the physical library, authorized customers are identified by a physical token such as a ticket or patron card. This is recognized by the staff and an agreed set of privileges is offered to the patron in accordance with his or her membership. This token also acts as an acceptance by the patron of the rules under which the collection is managed, for example by agreeing to a maximum number of items to be borrowed at a time.

Page 250 of 302