Editorial

Citation

Thornton, S. (2007), "Editorial", Performance Measurement and Metrics, Vol. 8 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/pmm.2007.27908baa.001

Editorial

The preparations for the 7th Northumbria International Conference on Performance Measurement in Libraries and Information Services are well underway, and by the time of publication should be complete. The latest in this biennial series will be held on the far side of the globe from Northumbria, in Cape Province, South Africa, and is indicative of the rapid and healthy growth in performance measurement in sub-Saharan Africa. So far there are proposals for 45 papers and posters, with speakers from all over the world, together with five workshops and the usual plenary sessions. I hope to see many of you at the Spier Wine Estate between the 13 and 16 August.

The papers in this issue of PMM are also an eclectic mix of topics of interest from around the world, with a general theme of identifying what the user wants. Many of us can remember a time when what the user got was what the professional librarians decided they should have, and no consideration was given to user preferences. But I wonder whether the trend is going too far in the other direction. It is relatively easy to find out what the user wants – just ask them – and then meet those wants to the extent that resources will allow. It is much more difficult to identify what the user needs.

In my last job, resources were limited. The user base had just lost virtually their entire library service overnight, and our task was to meet their needs with about a quarter of the former budget. While the number of users had also fallen to a quarter of what they had been, they were still scattered over the same number of sites. We knew what they wanted – their old service back again at the same level with the same staff on the same sites, and, perhaps, with more of this but a bit quicker and better at that. What we achieved was, I believe, an excellent service, which met the majority of their needs, if not their wants. Drawing out what those needs really were was for me the hardest part of the process. It took time, effort and thought. It meant getting to know the user base intimately. It meant listening and, more importantly, interpreting.

Even what the user wants may bear little relation to reality. Because the user likes his library and its staff, they are usually overly generous and will often tell you what they want in terms of what they think you can supply. When asked about opening hours they may suggest extending them by an hour, in the belief that that is what you might be able to do for them, if pushed. What the whole user base might actually need is three hours extra in both the morning and evening, to meet a dramatic work environment structural change caused by the introduction of flexible working. We are the professionals. We know – or should know – what is practical given the current resources and what is currently technically possible: but without knowing what the customer really needs, merely attempting to supply their wants is rarely enough.

Anne Moon starts us off with a report on the implementation of LibQUAL+™ at Rhodes University in South Africa, and how they have used the results of the survey to drive and focus improvements to the services they offer. All South African University Libraries were required to benchmark the quality of their service provision against the other university libraries in South Africa, to fulfil the requirements of the Institutional Audit imposed by the Council on Higher Education. Anne describes how they tackled the task, and how the results have been used to drive change. This is no whitewash – she details their areas of failings as well as those of success – but most importantly indicates how they intend to use the results to drive strategic planning and improvements for the future.

Also the theme of improving services, Luciana Sacchetti from Bologna University in Italy demonstrates how they enthusiastically adopted and implemented ISO 9001, and are using that as the driver for continuous improvement. It has, and still is, producing dramatic changes, not only in the quality of the services offered but the take up of those services by the users as well. Luciana’s experience so closely followed my own, implementing ISO 9001 first in DERA and then in Dstl in the UK, that I felt I could predict what I would read in the next paragraph or even on the next page. And I was right.

The first version of the standard got a very bad press – justifiably – as merely producing a stonking great manual no one would ever read. However, the latest version of ISO 9001 is very much different in both intent and practice, with the emphasis on finding out what you actually do, finding out how well it works, and improving on that performance. The key driver now is user feedback, and Luciana has made some interesting inferences from looking at the “Don’t Know” responses from customer surveys, which goes to show that no reply can be even more informative than a positive or negative one.

There will be those (and most of them will never read this anyway) who believe that they know how well their system is performing. Believe me, you could benefit greatly from Luciana’s approach – unless you really know how well you are performing, you don’t really know anything, and thinking you know without having any proof is even more dangerous.

Jenny Craven and Annika Nietzio take us into almost another world with a paper describing a EU funded research project on web accessibility. Libraries have often been the champions of the disabled in ways of innovative service provision and materials, but far too often those who design websites appear never to have learnt the lessons of the past. I know of one web site which had to be withdrawn for a radical redesign when it discovered that anyone who was red/green colour-blind saw only a grey mush. Jenny and Annika’s work goes much deeper than that, not only testing sites with a panels of visually impaired users, but combining this task-based approach with tool based automatic evaluation of the same sites. Task-based assessments are lengthy and expensive but produce results with a high confidence level. This research shows a positive way forward extending that high confidence level to automatic assessments as well.

Tim Bower and Bradford Dennis provide us with a very practical paper on how to extract more meaning from LibQUAL+™ results and using them to help develop strategic plans designed to improve patrons’ perceptions of service quality. They have noted that many of their stakeholders had difficulty comprehending the meaning of much of the data LibQUAL+™ produces, and advocate a new series of presentations of that data. It has been fascinating to follow the steady development of the tool from the first presentation I saw on SERVQUAL by Danuta Nitecki and conversations with Fred Heath and Colleen Cook at the 2nd PMM Conference in 1997, right up to the present day. Tim and Bradford bring a new perspective on the presentation of the results.

The final paper by John Amosford takes us away from the rarefied atmosphere of academia and academic libraries, and put us firmly back into the world of Public Libraries. It reports on the use of a survey to help assess learning outcomes generated by public lending libraries. By constructing a simple questionnaire, simply distributed, he has been able to gather valuable insights into the outcomes that public library users in the South West of England experience. John asks several serious questions about what can be gathered, and how it should be gathered and drawn out from the data sets they gathered. This is an innovative and original piece of work, which will no doubt generate much interest.

Lastly, we have a review by Dave Picken of Dr Alison Pickard’s first book, “Research Methods in Information”. I first had the pleasure of meeting Ali when she was a student assisting at the 1997 conference mentioned above. Now, on the teaching staff at Northumbria she has produced a book that I could have used time and time again before I retired. Dave did try to fob me off with a review that read “This is a good book. You should buy it”. While this was an accurate reflection of his opinion, I have badgered him for a little more than that. By the way, it is a good book, and you could do worse than buy it.

Steve Thornton