This page contains suggestions to improve current library services after understanding current user needs and behavior.
1. Run your library like a business.
A library must be seen as a business entity and not merely as service point, meaning that the library need to think of how to gain profit - not in order to fill in the pockets of the librarian, but to give more freedom for librarians to manage the library and to provide better services according to their understanding of users, whom they interact on daily basis. By having resource in their own hands, librarian may be able to organize programs according to users' needs without having to worry about depleting allocation from institutional policy-makers.
2. Libraries need to have marketing arms of their own.
The inevitable consequence of running a library like a business means having its own marketing arm or department. This is the unit where the libraries research about their users, discuss their marketing strategies and strategic alliances to make with other sectors in order for libraries to thrive profitably, both in the sense of money-making and attracting users (customers / clients).
3. Create ambience that relates to current users, and avoid retaining intellectual and serious library environments in the name of scholarly reasons.
Users nowadays are those highly exposed to fast-changing, colourful, entertaining, outspoken and informal environments allowed by technology and the Internet. These features are unavailable in most libraries where they still retain formal, serious and scholarly environment of the past. Too much 'hard' and 'active' regulations may not suits these target users anymore. Libraries must change accordingly.
4. Simplify library search interface to embrace such proven successful concept e.g. Google.
It is not wrong to imitate successful search engine model like Google. Their concept of simplicity to reach the complex back-end information storage has been a real hit with users. Libraries can adopt similar search engine interface for their libraries, but stressing about retrieving their own resources. .
5. Incorporating into the information retrieval system the consideration of human information behavior to the fullest and as experimentation to be at the edge of research in information retrieval with user-centric concept.
Considering each models of information behavior as proposed by scholars and based on further research made in the footsteps of those models, libraries should have their own team of information retrieval professionals to liaise about the best information retrieval design incorporating all the theories of information behavior, by experimentation. By doing this, libraries will always have an edge in providing information services.
6. Develop more interactive and interesting pages of search results such as those built by Amazon, where recommendations of library materials can be made based on searchers submitted search terms.
Amazon's interface is user-centric by having the ability to provide suggestion to individual customer based on their searches and account profiles and data. If libraries can provide similar user-centric service as a gateway to their resources, I believe the libraries can attract more users to their website.
The author of this web site is a final semester MLIS student at the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. She is currently in charge of a one-man-library in a marine consulting company in Petaling Jaya. Previously she worked as an assistant librarian at a National Library of Malaysia village library in her hometown, Machang, Kelantan.
Technology is so much fun, but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
Daniel J. Boorstin - American social historian and educator, 1914.
Apart from information retrieval there is virtually no other area of information science that has occasioned as much research effort and writing as "user studies".
Tom Wilson, 1981.
In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret’s nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.
Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973), U.S. biographer.