2004 Library Client Survey Results

In September of 2004 we conducted a survey of clients to find out what library services and facilities are important to you and how well we perform them. We received 1202 responses and would like to thank those of you who took the time to complete the survey form.

Information on survey method: More>> 
 

What did you tell us?
Our Strengths (those services and facilities that you rated both as “most important” and where we performed best)

• Library staff treat me fairly and without discrimination
• Library staff are friendly
• Library staff provide quality service
• Library staff provide accurate answers

Our weaknesses (those services and facilities that you rated as “most important” but where we performed less well)

• The library collection is adequate to my needs
• Information resources (books, electronic, etc.) are easily accessed
• Access to electronic databases is easily available
• Opening hours meet my needs
     

How will we respond to your feedback?

Strengths
Your feedback indicates that staff is our greatest strength. We will continue our efforts to improve staff training and morale and have a number of staffing initiatives on our 2005 operational plan including staff mentoring, job swaps and planning for the closure of Churchlands Library to ensure that adequate staffing levels are maintained, prior to and after this closure.
  

Weaknesses
Your feedback indicates that the library collection is of particular concern. The University has provided us with an additional $500,000 (about a 20% increase on our current expenditure) to spend on the collection annually on an on-going basis as from 2005. This extra funding will be spent across all areas of the collection and will enable some significant improvements to the collection from 2005 onwards.

Several measures are in place to provide easy access to information resources, including a stock take of our collections to make sure that what is on the catalogue reflects what is on the shelf, increased funding to employ library staff to shelve materials and a weeding program to remove items that are no longer of value from the collection.

As more of our resources move into the online environment we are conscious that reliable and easy access is important. To this end we will have a new more powerful library server in 2005 and will be performing a review of both our web pages and our online catalogue to improve both functionality and appearance. We will also be launching a new interface for our databases that will allow added features including the ability to search up to 8 databases simultaneously.

We recognise that a number of our clients do not feel that our current opening hours meet their needs and will perform further analysis of this during 2005 in an attempt to determine whether longer hours or different hours are required.

Many of your comments concern inadequacies with our current physical library environments and equipment. We will incorporate your suggestions into the planning for our new library building at Joondalup, scheduled for completion at the end of 2006, and into the refurbishment of the Mt Lawley Library as building programs at that campus see Student Services and the Graduate School relocate out of the library building.

Future plans for client surveys
We hope to conduct this survey every year so that we can track our performance against your needs over time. We will also use our survey results to benchmark with other Australian University Libraries and hope with time to improve our comparative results.

 We welcome any comments or questions regarding the survey