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SPIE - optics and photonics

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CAB Abstracts - agriculture

The CAB Abstracts database, an important resource for agriculture and the applied life sciences.

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Customer Service, workshop - Day 2

After a summary of Day 1 we continued with a session about the user. What characterizes the ideal user and how does that differ from the reality, the user who really shows up in the library. Is he/she always nice, thankful and happy, can express his/her needs, used to handle technology and understands our library rules, or…?

We talked about the value of the user. Even if they sometimes can be difficult to handle and does not follow our rules “without the users the librarian’s don’t have to be there”.

What qualifications and tools does the librarian need to help, serve and tackle the everyday variety of users with different needs and different experience of using a library.  What can we do to strengthen the librarians role, and profession? How can we perform a reference interview in a good way so that the user will get the best possible help? To know the value of the profession – “know why we are better than Google”. These were questions we constantly lifted during the day(s).

We also experienced how important it is to listen. That you can be a good or bad listener. What difference it makes for the one who tries to explain or ask something.

Sidra Nhacudime tries to tell Alda Cossa something but she was a very bad listener 😉

The presentation from Day 2

Customer Service, workshop – Day 1

Tove Lekselius and Malin Utter

We, Tove Lekselius (University Library) and Malin Utter (School of Library and Information Science) from the University of Borås in Sweden, held a workshop with focus on Customer Service and UX (user experience) in libraries for around 30 librarians from UEM. Three days with a lot of discussions, exchange of experience and practial exercises - and a lot of smiles and laughter. 

Here is a short summary of what we did in Maputo 23-25 April

We started by getting to know each other with a short presentation round, where we also talked about where we come from, and why we were invited to hold this workshop.  This was followed by discussions of where a meeting between a user and the library takes place. It’s not just face to face but also in the library room, on the web, by phone and email. Next came discussions of what a good and poor treatment of users could be. A device that we used constantly was “Good treatment can weigh up poor knowledge, but poor treatment barely weighs up anything”. 

The day ended with a session about the use of common guidelines and what such guidelines could content. Guidelines is to be used to make the work at the reference desk easier and more quality controlled. 

The presentation from Day 1

Customer Service, workshop - Day 3

This day was a practical day, where we talked about and tried the joy of UX. "User Experience or UX, as it is defined in the library context, is a suite of techniques based around first understanding and then improving the experiences people have when using the library services"

First we tried an evaluating tool called Love/Brake up Letter, where you write a letter to something that you either love or don't want to have anything to do with anymore. Some examples from the participants that was read aloud with a lot of smiles and laughter:

Love - The Book, The Trainers 😊
Break up - The Salary, A Papaya Tree, The Bus

Next on the agenda was Observations in the library room. The participants went out in the library looking for things that could be improved, took photos and the discussed what they do to to make it better for the users and the library staff.

A mix of things that could be improved, part of which can be explained by ongoing work.
Some easy to fix and some maybe a bit more complicated.

We also tried Cognitive Mapping, where you ask a user to draw a picture of what he/she e.g. like to do when coming to the library - no words just pictures. This could be used as a basis for a deep interview with the user for a deeper understanding of how the library really is used.

The final exercise was Guerilla Testing, where you ask users what they think about the library in general or a specific topic. The entire group went out and talked to the students that was in the library at the time and came back with many interesting thoughts and ideas.

Thank you all - participants, Democrito, Bruno, Horacio and the rest of the library staff at UEM for an amazing week. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.

Tove & Malin

The presentation from Day 3