Personalized Boutique Service: Critical to Academic Library Success?

Abstract

An academic library that focuses on delivering a personalized service is examined within the context of the boutique library model. It is suggested that a critical success factor in adopting a personalized, boutique-style service is acquiring knowledge and insight of our users. This, together with appropriate evaluation, will assist with providing evidence of service impact. A critical incident survey for third year dissertation students in a subject library is used to demonstrate the depth of knowledge essential for services to provide for their user populations. The extent to which obtaining user knowledge for making informed decisions about services underpins any academic library strategy is dependent on service managers. The conclusion is that local knowledge, along with evaluation of that information and tailored service implementation, is essential for academic library success, whatever the size of institution.

Understanding Patterns of Library Use Among Undergraduate Students from Different Disciplines

“…This proved valuable as a way to evidence the data from the project in a real life situation, where students could explain their reasons for library use. As Tilley (2013) states, this should not be a one off conversation, but the beginning of frequent knowledge collection.…”

“…For example, known "low-use" subjects could be targeted differently from known "high use" subjects in order to give a more personalized boutique service to the end user. This addresses one of Tilley's (2013) success factors of the boutique model, "[k]nowledge of users' needs and activity-their preferences, the irritants-and their methods of working" (p.82). However, using library analytics and making the assumption that increased use of library resources may lead to increased achievement, knowledge of subject cohorts methods of working could be used to guide them to appropriate resources.…”

“…Libraries and librarians have often been accused of deciding on what's best for the user without consultation (Wells, 1996;Wilson, 2000;Tilley, 2013). "One of the most complex issues to deal with in acquiring knowledge about students is concerned with the assumptions library staff make about student behaviour" (Tilley, 2013, p.84).…”

Qualitative methods for engaging students in performance measurement

“…Tilley (2013) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 …”

Web-Scale Discovery: Impact on Library Database Web Page Views and Usage

“…Academic libraries are faced with many challenges. One of the more pressing needs is to provide electronic access to their vast collections, which is especially vital considering that the majority of users who arrive at institutional databases do so from search engines, not via the library homepage or discovery layers (Gottfried 2011;Tilley 2013). But some librarians feel the introduction of Web-scale discovery layers "has the potential to radically change how users interact with and discover the wealth of information available within library collections" (Way 2010, 219).…”