Personalising Library Services in Higher Education: The Boutique Approach

Citation

Hallam, G. (2013), "Personalising Library Services in Higher Education: The Boutique Approach", Library Management, Vol. 34 No. 6/7, pp. 552-553. https://doi.org/10.1108/LM-06-2013-0053

As Editors of the text Personalising Library Services in Higher Education: The Boutique Approach, Andy Priestner and Elizabeth Tilley, both from the University of Cambridge, bring together a range of perspectives on the development of a user‐centric model of service delivery. The argument for offering highly customised services may appear to counter the current trend towards more streamlined, standardised services adopted by university libraries as they face the challenges of financial cutbacks, particularly at a time when student numbers are increasing. This book, however, highlights the fact that academic library clients should not be viewed as a single homogenous mass, but should be recognised as distinct cohorts of users, each with their own interests and needs.

The inspiration for the concept of a “boutique” approach comes from the hotel industry, where boutique hotels aim to provide highly personalised services in a unique and luxurious environment. Very appropriately, the Library Hotel in New York is selected as being the epitome of the boutique hotel. Accordingly, boutique library services are tailored to the needs of a specific group of customers, with examples drawn from Singapore public libraries: library@orchard is aimed at the young adult market and library@esplanade focuses on the performing arts community. The authors point out that, when compared with the public library sector, the academic library sector “boasts a larger number of specialist subject libraries, with unique collections and users with more specific needs” (p. 5) and that these specialist libraries should be protected from the push to create “one size fits all” generic services. While this may prompt readers to consider the role of special librarians – who can legitimately be described as “boutique” library service providers – the focus of the book is limited to academic libraries.

The text comprises ten chapters, supported by eight brief case studies. Despite the inference of having an international flavour, the authors are predominantly drawn from university libraries in the UK. The organisation of the content is a little confusing: the case studies are presented in the table of contents as “Case Studies: Section 1” and “Case Studies: Section 2”, but the relationship of these case studies with the actual chapters is not clearly explained. The book is “topped and tailed” with chapters written by Priestner and Tilley: Chapter 1 provides the introduction to the concept of the boutique approach and Chapter 10 endeavours to summarise the key actions that support more personalised services. In between there is a patchwork of essays and case studies on library services that are at best badged as “personalised services”, covering various themes such as face‐to‐face communication, social media, library space, information literacy, LibGuides and marketing. The common thread that stitches the patchwork together is the focus on user‐centric services. A detailed index helps the reader locate topics of specific interest.

This is not an academic text underpinned by theory and research: the authors propose a general model for the boutique approach to library services and illustrate it with different ideas about how this might manifest itself in academic libraries. The narrative style is casual but informative: readers can happily dip in and find some useful tips on how to increase the level of personalisation for their students and researchers. Hidden amongst all the practical advice is a valuable chapter written by David Streatfield on impact evaluation: designers of any new service need to understand the objectives of the service and how it might make a real difference to the particular user group, they should establish reliable indicators to measure the impact and ensure that the outcomes are clearly communicated to the key stakeholders.

The book contains plenty of tips and tricks to help the library practitioner, whether a new graduate or a seasoned professional, think about fresh approaches to customer service and client interaction. Library teams that are keen to introduce new marketing strategies could potentially review individual chapters to stimulate discussion about alternative ways to engage their users. Some of the ideas may come across as common practice – or simply common sense – but the book may nevertheless encourage librarians in all sectors to engage in critical reflective practice about the services they currently provide and how they might do things differently in the future.