By Katy Kavanagh Webb, East Carolina University
Presented on March 18, 2015 for the Trends in Analyzing Reference Data portion of the NCLA-RASS Conference Series--Trends in Reference 2015.
2. Research Consultations at Joyner Library
History—Issues
Student requests
consultation via
Google Form
Request is received
by Joyner staff,
who looks for the
correct librarian
Staff member
prints the request
and puts it in to the
librarian's mailbox
Librarian emails
student to set up a
time for the consult
Student responds
with a time in the
coming few days
Have done consultations for a long time at ECU, but the system was very cumbersome. It took up to 4 days for the students to get help. Describe the process.
During the Fall 2014 semester, we decided to address the issue of turn around time. We conducted a questionnaire where we asked whether they would prefer evening and weekend hours, and how long they expected to wait for the service. We only had 5 respondents to the questionnaire. One interesting tidbit here was that the students were asked, “How soon would you have liked to receive your consultation after you requested it?” The possibilities given were 1-3 hours, 3-12 hours, 12-24 hours, 1-2 days, or 3 or more days. Two people responded that 12-24 hours was acceptable, with 1 person each for 1-2 days and 3 or more days. This is surprising, since it was hypothesized that students would expect help to come quicker than 1-3 days. Three respondents answered that they would be interested in evening and weekend consultations. Of course, there can be no absolute conclusions drawn from a pool of five respondents, but the feedback was welcomed during the decision-making process.
During the same time that the questionnaire was going out to current users of the consultation service, I was considering concrete ideas for making changes to the consultation service. Members of the department considered ways to cut out unnecessary steps in the current consultation process. We felt that the main time waster was the process by which librarians email back and forth with students to find an acceptable time. Using the room reservation system as an example, the department felt that the student should have a time that they were supposed to come to meet with a librarian sooner in the process. Almost accidentally, I found a C&RL News article about the product YouCanBook.Me while reading through the October issue. In it, librarians from Oakland University discussed the positives of the free scheduling software in their liaison work.
I got buy-in from the rest of the department by checking in first with people one-on-one. I demoed the product on the YouCanBookMe website and just talked about how it would change the system. I also presented on this topic in our weekly departmental meeting more than once. I invited others to demo the product on their own at their desks, and then give me feedback.
Changed the name to Book a Librarian. The new system would have students pick the time first, and then the messy process of choosing the librarian to conduct the consultation would happen behind the scenes—almost like magic. Also, I aimed for a 24 hour turn around time to reduce our response time by nearly 3 DAYS!
When a student wishes to book a librarian, they will click a link from the “Ask a Librarian” page and be taken to http://joynerlibrary.youcanbook.me . A screenshot of the interface can be seen here. Users of the consultation service are given a listing of open times to choose to get a consultation. These hours correspond with the RIS desk hours, and include more evening hours than were previously possible. Hours begin at 8 AM and end at 9:00 PM on days that the library is open 24 hours. Saturday hours are not available, due to the fact that these hours are covered by graduate student employees. Sunday hours begin at 4:00 PM and end at 9:00 PM in order to the evening reference librarian time to prepare for consultations scheduled prior to the Sunday shift. The times are shown in 30 minute blocks. 24-hour advanced notice is required, meaning that students cannot sign up for a consultation on the form that same day. Consultations can be scheduled up to 16 weeks in advance. The appearance of the site is meant to mimic the colors and style of room reservation system.
Before we went live on the website, I scheduled a one hour period where the department was encouraged to pretend to be a student and see how the system worked to a student. This also gave us a lot of sample consultations in the calendar that allowed us to see how these would appear in the Google Calendar.
Real time testing was also necessary. We had a professor who came in before the semester started who wanted to have his students each do a book a librarian session. Since he had 70 students, we worked out with the professor that the students would come over in 2 person pairs with similar paper topics. There were only about 8 possible combinations of topics for the papers, so this made it easier to prepare for. This gave us a chance to demo the new system with a lot of people at once, but with less preparation needed. It was a very positive experience, and I think that we could offer this kind of service to other classes now that the process of booking a librarian is less cumbersome.
Some people in the department have expressed that they were nervous about the change, but that they were happily surprised about how well this worked. The nerves part came in how quick the turn-around would be. Just this small change in name has been really helpful and is more accessible to students.
