Target Audience: Librarians who want to focus their library services to best meet the needs of their patrons
Learning Outcomes:
1. Participants will be able to identify and assess the issues to be addressed in a patron satisfaction survey.
2. Participants will be able to create and distribute a satisfaction survey and analyze the results to identify the best services and delivery methods for their patrons.
Librarians provide a multitude of services for patrons, but it’s not always easy to know how—or if—these services are being used, or whether they’re even of value to patrons. Do patrons consult the web pages you create? Do the handouts and pathfinders help patrons, or do they even know these are available? What resources—including those beyond your library’s—are patrons consulting? Is most of their current awareness via social media? What do you do with this information? These issues directly affect what to deliver and how to deliver it using methods most beneficial to patrons. But how do you determine the “what” and the “how”? To learn how to better survey library patrons, the Student Services Committee of ALL-SIS is undertaking a project to collect and compile student satisfaction surveys from member libraries. The result will be a compilation of the contributed surveys and a sample “best” survey culled from the responses, which can be used as a blueprint for your library surveys. This program will examine the benefits of a satisfaction survey, how to determine what information you want to ascertain, the best way to ask the questions to get those answers, the sample “best” survey, and what to do with the results. Although based on information from ALL-SIS members, the results will be of value to those in all library settings.