Week Six - Chris

Storytelling in Organisations

In this week's activity, we will each identify a story that helps explain issues that need to be addressed within our organisation.

One key professional value of librarianship is the centrality of the user needs. Ideally, all decisions that are made with regards to collections and services must be made with the needs of users in mind. After all, the provision of access to information to our users is the ultimate purpose of the library.

However, there are occasions when we lose sight of this goal, especially in larger academic libraries where many colleagues rarely have the chance to interact with users on the frontline. This can result in situations where actions are taken that make sense from a librarian's perspective but not from the user's point of view.

I can neatly Illustrate this with reference to an announcement that I was asked to process for the Library website. An upgrade to the Library's integrated management system was about to be made, which would bring certain Library services offline. Unfortunately, the announcement was phrased using the product names of the systems (which users would not understand). The original read something like this:

Due to scheduled INNOPAC maintenance, access to ILLiad will be temporarily suspended.

The message as received would have been totally unintelligible to users. After liaising with the requester, it was revised as follows:

Due to scheduled maintenance of Library systems, access to the online interlibrary loan system will be temporarily suspended.

This is an example of how libraries have to be vigilant with regards to ensuring everything that they do is done with users in mind. Actually, the fact that announcements need to go through me (a public services librarian) shows that we have some measures to safeguard this. But this issue also applies to more technical aspects of librarianship, such as the design of databases.