1. The Role Of User Services in 21st Century Academic Libraries
Georgia College & State University
Milledgeville, GA
Anthony J. Adam
May 2010

2. What Is User Services?
User anyone who has contact with the library and its personnel, either onsite or remotely
Services the frontline of the library experienced by the user and supported by technical services and the library administration

3. What Makes Up User Services?
Reference Services
Circulation Services
Interlibrary Loan/Document Delivery
Reserves
Stack Maintenance
Collection Development
Periodicals
Distance Services

4. Our Competition
Search Engines (Bing, Google)
Question Answering Services (Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers, UnAsked, BlurtIt)
Homework Help Websites (HomeworkHelp.com, HomeworkSpot.com)
Wikis (Wikipedia, Wikiversity, WikiBooks)

5. The Role of User Services
The Role of User Services is to provide high quality assistance at all service points, via all forms of dissemination, in order that the user is satisfied.

6. To insure that our users get the best possible service, we must both embrace the competition and improve upon it whenever possible.

7. How Do We Do That?
Demonstrate to our users that the Internet is not necessarily the final stopping point or the best source for their needs.
Provide service of such high quality that users will come to us first, because they trust us to give them the help that they need

8. Experimentation + Participation = Success

9. The Service Ideal
Library units are interconnected
if service is bad at one point, users may believe that all units will offer bad service

10.

11. Service = User Satisfaction
The level of service correlates to the level of user satisfaction. Users will respond positively to great service, and vice versa.

12. How Do We Assess Ideal Service?
Establish success targets What is an acceptable level of user satisfaction? Track over time using:
Focus Groups
In-house Created User Surveys
Secret Shoppers
Satisfaction Surveys (NSSE, FSSE, LibQual)

13. Information Literacy

14. Distance Services

15. Document Delivery

16. Reference Services

17. Circulation Services

18. Can Technology Help?
A Virtual Library Help Desk can include
Video Reference via Skype, IM, etc.
Burst Messaging via Twitter, etc.
Keeping In Touch via Facebook, etc.
But dont assume users
will embrace the technology!

19. What Does the Future Hold In Store?
All libraries will rely on cooperative collection development and document delivery
Most reference resources will only be available electronically
Users will demand immediate, 24/7 response to their needs
More users will request services and materials via remote access
Librarians will be information evaluators rather than just processors

20. In Sum.
Service takes precedence over everything we can have a huge materials collection, but if we turn off our customers because of bad service, they will go elsewhere
Users see the library as a single entity if one unit gives bad service, all units are affected
Change is the only constant and is inevitable keep what is good and toss what is bad

21. The Choice is Ours
Satisfied Users
Unsatisfied Users

22. Questions?