Know What They Want...and Give It to Them

A few months back, OCLC released a report called, Online Catalogs: What Users and Librarians Want. I found this to be an interesting read from many perspectives; the fact that library staff have very different expectations from a catalog than our users do isn't surprising though I had not really given this question much prior consideration.

The salient point of this report for me, though, is how our users view the process of obtaining what they want from the library in general. We, as service providers, often think of borrowing items from the library in discrete steps; for example: getting to the library, searching the catalog, locating an item on the shelf, checking out. Thus, we tend to attempt to improve our services in terms of the environmental boundaries we perceive between these steps (we plan as though processes involved in searching the catalog have nothing to do with processes for checking out books).

According to the OCLC report, though, "end users expect a seamless flow from discovery to delivery." Our customers want direct links to online content and they want evaluative information like excerpts and tables of contents from titles accessible in the library catalog. This kind of information is so helpful in deciding whether the title meets their needs before going through the necessary steps to have an item sent from another location and making a trip to the library to check it out and, potentially wasting valuable time.

One way the library can provide this kid of information (beyond the LJ, Kirkus, and PW reviews now popping up in some catalogs) is through taking advantage of the work of others! The Google Books project has made so much content available online that now, many of the books owned by the library have significant sections of their content readily available as exactly the kind of evaluative tool our customers want.

I noticed in a slide presentation David Lee King put together for some library people down in Texas that Ann Arbor District Library is linking to Google Books content from their catalog. This is a great idea that meets the needs of our customers in a very satisfactory way. Because it's fun to toss out ideas like this to the folks with whom I work, I asked Sacramento Public Library's Systems Supervisor Sarah Smith if this was something we could do. What seemed like no more than a few minutes later (she claims it was two hours), SPL's catalog was up and running with the same feature. Take a look at the screen shot:













Quite appropriately, the first item I found in our catalog that had the link to Google Books content was one entitled, "Creating Public Value"! With "value added" services like this one delivered solely by the efforts of awesome librarians like Sarah (as opposed to our sometimes-hard-to-work-with vendors), we are taking one more step across the bridge that separates the experiences of our in-library visitors from our online visitors.