2007.  Evaluated use of resource sharing tools by member libraries and providing recommendations for developing a regional resource sharing and delivery plan.

(PDF)
Report identifying six trends affecting library delivery services.

NetFlix is easy, personal, fast, and convenient. It assists users in finding titles they will not only enjoy but titles that they are probably very excited to find because they are surprised that they could be found or they’ve never heard of them before. Their choices are not limited to the blockbusters of the day. NetFlix makes it very easy for customers to borrow and return titles. NetFlix is to movies as libraries should be to books.

Make it Easy
Cathy De Rosa, Lorcan Dempsey and Alane Wilson tell us that library users prefer to do things on their own (Environmental Scan, Social Landscape section, 3). Studies have shown that the more unmediated a service is, the more popular it is. Libraries everywhere report increases in circulation after self-check is rolled out. ILL is more likely to be used when it can be initiated without talking to a human being and remote borrowing has also been shown to increase circulation.

With libraries, there is a “transaction cost” for each step of the processes involved in finding, requesting and actually taking possession of an item. These costs are measured in time, attention, money and expertise. The first transaction cost involves locating the item in the OPAC. If the user is able to find the desired item in the OPAC, she/he must then locate the item to determine how best to acquire it. Is it on the shelf? Can I put it on hold? Can I borrow it from another library? Do I need to put in an interlibrary loan request? Each of these steps may require additional authentication or search steps. These transaction costs inhibit use.

Make It Personal

While library search and discovery tools are improving with innovations such as faceted browsing, they are not intuitive nor are they personalized for the user. Utilizing the customer’s circulation history and their feedback about items borrowed, libraries could also find those special titles that excite their customers. Academic libraries have made more inroads into providing some personalization with portals designed around the student’s coursework. Public libraries, on the other hand, have done very little to personalize the online experience of their users.

Make it Fast and Convenient

Remote borrowing (in place of the cumbersome ILL process) is making it easier for users to request items. But there are few new developments when it comes to quickly and conveniently putting the item into the user’s hands. Customers can place holds on items from most library websites but that’s where the convenience ends. Once the item becomes available (the item is returned or is transferred from another library), the customer is notified by email or phone call (often from a virtual person) of its availability. The completion of the request is then left in the hands of the customer.

Depending on how long items circulate at a library, how many people have the same item on hold, and how long it takes to get items transferred from one library to another, it may have taken weeks for the item to become available. Already, the delay in fulfilling the customer’s order may have fallen outside of the “window of usefulness” (Patricia Weaver-Meyers and Wilbur A. Stolt, 1996. “Delivery Speed, Timeliness and Satisfaction: Patrons’ Perceptions About interlibrary loan Service: Customer Satisfaction in GMRLC Libraries” Journal of Library Administration, 23(1-2)) – the period of time when the customer could make use of the item. If the customer still wants the item, they must find the time to get to the library to pick it up.

Getting to the library isn’t necessarily easy. It certainly isn’t convenient. In urban and suburban settings, it may require navigating traffic to get across town, paying for parking, waiting on public transportation or squeezing the trip in around work schedules. Depending on one’s hourly wage, the cost of the trip could be difficult to afford (another bus ticket, more fuel for the car) or it could be difficult to justify (high earners might rather purchase the item and have it delivered than spend the time it takes to get to the library and back). In rural settings, the distance to the library might make the trip particularly time-consuming and untenable.

Libraries could also make it much easier for their customers to get and return books by offering home delivery options using UPS or FedEx. For high wage earners, providing home delivery options for an additional fee would be a welcome service option. Allowing customers to return items by U.S. Mail using library-provided envelopes would reduce the burden on customers. Even drive-through pick-up and drop-off services would alleviate some of the transaction costs of using the library. Libraries could also reduce the wait time for items on hold buy purchasing more titles of a particularly popular item. In many cases, the cost of acquiring a new book is less than getting a copy through ILL channels (Sharon Campbell, 2006, “To Buy or Borrow, That Is the Question”, Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery & Electronic Reserve 19(3)).

If libraries made it as personal, easy and convenient to find and borrow titles as Amazon and NetFlix do, circulation in libraries would skyrocket. Instead, business is booming at Amazon and NetFlix and circulation is holding relatively steady in public libraries.

[This is an excerpt from a longer article I've written and which is currently being peer-reviewed. Here's the whole article (PDF).]

Last week I was in Denver participating in a symposium about library courier services. The symposium, Moving Mountains: Exploring Library Courier Services, was an excellent opportunity for people in the delivery trenches to get together and share ideas about the myriad ways delivery can be accomplished in a library settings. There were as many ways to do it as there are library relationships.

As resource-sharing opportunities grow and more and more libraries expose their collections to users using innovative mash-ups (I think that might be redundant), we’ll see even more variety in how delivery is done. Or will we? Are we destined to partner with UPS or FedEx for a large portion of our delivery needs because our users will demand that level of professionalism? I think that the answer to that question is yes. If you’d like to hear what else I had to say (or intended to say), here’s a PDF of my presentation, Library Delivery 2.0. Comments welcome.

Judy O’Connell (heyjude) has developed a very nice graphic called the Library 2.0 Meme Map. As clever as the graphic is, I think it is missing a key component of the Library 2.0 environment; namely, the fulfillment side.

The fulfillment side of library services in a library 2.0 world is something I’ve been thinking about for the last several days in anticipation of my talk at Moving Mountains: A Symposium Exploring Library Courier Services. My talk is entitled….you guessed it Delivery 2.0.

Some stray thoughts on the topic: A true 2.0 library will get the information to the user wherever the user wants it. It will allow the user to specify the format of the item in and the manner in which they will receive it. A 2.0 library will let customers who wish to pay for premium services do so, e.g. Fed Ex Next Day Delivery for an $15, Messenger Delivery today for $20.

A 2.0 library will find a way to get the item into their users hands or inbox regardless of whether that requires buying the item, borrowing the item, digitizing the item, or downloading the item. All 2.0 libraries will have reciprocal relationships for borrowing and returning items so that most any library can borrow an item from most any other library regardless of library type or region.

A 2.0 library will provide an easy-to-use self-addressed stamped envelope that can be used to return the items by mail (think NetFlix…and hold that thought).

As soon as I get my synapses going on this topic of library 2.0 and delivery 2.0, I end up struggling with the limitations of ILS 1.5 I see the original text-based library systems as the 1.0 version (there are still some out there). ILS 1.5 is what we’ve got now — graphical interfaces on top of same old ILS systems (oh, plus MARC field 856).

I’m developing ideas about ILS 2.0 with much help from Karen Calhoun of Cornell who wrote an excellent report called The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Disocovery Tools (PDF). Among numerous great ideas, Karen suggests enriching the catalog experience with services such as “more like this,” “get it,” cover art and reviews. And I recommend such services as “Your Friends’s Faves,” “Librarian Picks,” “Recommendations for You.”

Back to my synapses…having helped our user find stuff to read that they are going to lovebecause we are treating them like individuals with unique preferences instead of as generic-walmart-customer, we alow them to build their book queue. Now, if they choose, each time they return an item by mail (using those handy return envelopes mentioned above), the next item in their queue goes out to them. Just like NetFlix.

Let’s keep going. Because we’re asking our customers to rate the books they’ve read (which allows us to build their customized recommendations), we will know which books really knocked their socks off. When weeding time comes up, we notify the people who LOVED that book (or something similar) that they can now buy that book. Yep, just like NetFlix.

John Blyberg (blyberg.net) identifes the hurdles we face getting to Delivery 2.0 but I think I’m a bit more hopeful than he is. He describes the library condition as a bit of a catch-22 when it comes to delivery because library’s don’t charge for services and have to manage huge inventories of stock. But…why can’t we charge for some services? And, one thing the catalog does very well is manage stock. What we also need the catalogs to do is exchange stock with our ‘business partners.”

It’s all doable. We just have to have to will to make some changes. That gets us into Librarian 2.0. But let’s leave it alone for now.

Library delivery
Library2

Sarah Long is the Executive Director of the North Suburban Library System In December of 2005, she wrote an article for the NSLS website about the importance of regional library systems in her state. Her comments are instructive.

Here are Sarah’s top ten reasons regional library systems are vital (at least in in Illinois. Per David Letterman, she ends with the the most important reason last:

10. Serve as a catalyst.
9. Promote relevant standards.
8. Model and promote multitype cooperation.
7. Aggregate member power.
6. Facilitate member networking.
5. Facilitate resource sharing.
4. Facilitate the delivery of materials between members.
3. Consult with staff in member libraries.
2. Lead advocacy initiatives.
1. Improve the skills and capabilities and broaden the horizons of staff in member libraries.

The role of regional library systems differs quite a bit state by state. In my state of California, Sarah’s list is useful more as a wish list than a description of how California’s regional library systems function. In fact, the State Library has just completed a round of focus groups to assess the service role of California’s cooperative library system and you’ll find that many of the respondents suggested California’s regional systems do just what Illinois is already doing. The result of the focus groups will be used to identify the “most effective strategy for retooling resource sharing for California in the 21st century” per State Librarian Susan Hildreth. Here’s the full report (pdf).

As I stated in my article Resource Sharing & Library Delivery Services, it is a critical time for resource sharing. Technology is changing fast and users are demanding a level of service that is difficult for libraries to meet but not Google and Amazon. How libraries meet these demands could make all the difference in whether libraries continue to function primarily as repositories of information or whether they transition into something more akin to community centers.

I recently researched trends in interlibrary loan and resource sharing and provided my conclusion in this report: Resource Sharing & Library Delivery Services.

The gist of the article is that resource sharing is changing. Formalized resource sharing arrangements are growing. Library catalogs are being unionized making unmediated borrowing between libraries possible. Users are responding positively to the improved interfaces of catalogs that allow them to easily search, locate and request items, from almost anywhere, for themselves. Resource sharing and interlending is increasing dramatically. As a result, demands on delivery services are high and likely to grow.

Materials delivery is an important yet neglected part of the process of getting useful information into the hands of users. Library delivery is usually associated with moving materials from library to library, but in the very near future it will be more important for libraries to deliver material directly to their users. Users choose convenience over quality. They don’t care about the best source of information, the want a satisfactory source. An information source that is satisfactory and convenient will always be chosen over a source that is inconvenient.

Increasingly, library users expect an easy-to-use, transparent system for locating and requesting library material for delivery anywhere. They expect service comparable to Amazon and NetFlix. What users would like is to select items for themselves, specify where and when they need it and to be kept informed of the status of the requested item.

Current delivery programs suffer from their lack of integration with the circulation function. Over time, this is likely to change and circulation will include delivery into the hands of the user. Better discovery tools, resource-sharing opportunities and high user expectations are changing the needs of library delivery services. Organizations providing these services must remain agile and ready to adapt to the increased and changing demands of library users for fast, convenient, and flexible delivery.

Read the full report