Case Study
Delivering and Improving Library Services at Croydon
College
By Infor Library & Information Solutions
Library Overview
Croydon
College, located in Greater London, UK, has approximately 25,000 students
ranging from 14-16 year olds, who come to the college to study vocational
courses that their schools cannot offer, through general 16-19 “Furtherâ€
education students, to those studying on Degree and Post-Graduate courses. The
college library is tasked with ensuring delivery of a high quality, and personalized, service to this
diverse range of learners.
The college is the largest provider of Further Education and the sole provider of
Higher Education in the London Borough of Croydon. The college library has
around 60,000 items in stock including nearly 5,000 audio-visual items and 250
journal subscriptions. In addition the library subscribes to over 50 on-line
resources of which several of the key ones are searchable through the catalogue using Infor’s
V-spaces federated search software.
The
college can trace its roots back to the creation of a school of art in 1868 and
has always had a strong focus on the arts. A significant proportion of the
university level courses are in art, design, theatre and the visual arts.
Consequently the library has a large art collection which accounts for over a
sixth of the entire book stock. Previous students of the college have included
David Bowie and fashion designer John
Rocha.
The
library implemented a full self-service system at the end of July 2008, and will
move to RFID as part of a new library, due to open in 2010.
The Need for
Scalability, Analysis, Self-Service and a Robust Workflow
In the
beginning of 2008 the college opened a new campus. The time-frame from initial
planning to the opening of the campus was less than 4 months. The library from
its side had only five weeks notice that a new library location had to be
opened.
With the tight time-frame, Infor’s integrated library system, Vubis Smart, would
be put to test. The system had to easily accommodate an additional location in
virtually no-time. Another important need that had always been a requirement for
the library was detailed analysis of transactions in the system. Having
knowledge about system usage, both from a staff and enduser perspective, is key
as the library continuously seeks to improve services.
For
students, of course, self-service was a major need. The library implemented
AquaBrowserâ„¢in 2006 as the catalogue front-end. Yet, providing students the
ability to easily manage their own accounts, for example, remained an imperative
requirement.
For
staff, finally, the system had to offer improved workflows. Eliminating
redundancy and saving time are of major importance to improving the efficiency
of library operations.
Quality Service
First
The
opening of a new library location necessitated quick action on part of Infor’s
Professional Services Team. Vubis Smart had to accommodate new parameters and be
up and running from day one.
Says
Thomas Butler, Library Operations Manager for Croydon College Library: “The team
at Infor was able, very quickly, to change our system over to create the second
site and to set up all the parameters to be able to transfer stock between
sites.
From
putting the initial request into Infor the new library was up and running, on
the system at least, within a couple of hours and we were able to make the very
tight timeframe of opening the new library with all the stock on the shelves at
the right location.â€
It’s About Knowledge, Staff Workflow and Student Needs
Thomas
Butler continues: “One of the strongest features of the Vubis Smart system is the integrated reporting module called SSP. The ability to build
custom reports that can take data from any part of the system has enabled us to
produce, quickly and easily, detailed statistics that previously wouldn’t have
been available.
We can
now produce quarterly audits of our holdings, which have proved to be useful not
only with auditors but also with inspectors from the various funding bodies.
The
system can automate the reports to run overnight and consequently when I log
onto my PC in the morning I have a full report on the previous days
transactions, number of loans, number of reservations, online transactions,
times of transactions etc.
This has
enabled us to demonstrate continued and significant improvements to the service.
The launch of Aquabrowser created an over 400% increase in online usage, figures
that were quickly extracted from the SSP functionality in Vubis Smart.
The
system is very good at keeping a traceable history of transactions. This is
useful when a team member has a query and can be used as a training aid.
When the
same type of error occurs regularly we can check to see if it is a general issue
that many staff are making, or a training issue with an individual team member.
The
ability to produce receipts for returns and renewals of items from the system
has dramatically reduced the number of claims returned and disputed returns that we
previously had.
One of
the most useful functions is the ability to change user in the middle of a
transaction. A number of the higher level functions on the system are not
available to staff working on the issue desk, and at times it is necessary for a
senior member of staff to step in to be able to complete a transaction, or to
authorize an exception on the account. For that person to be able to log
straight in without having to backtrack out of an account, log in and then get back into the account is critical.
The
ability to assign access rights on a person by person basis has ensured full
accountability of team members actions and makes sure that mistakes aren’t made
by someone accessing a part of the system they shouldn’t be.
Since
2006 we have been using Aquabrowser as our front end, with Vubis Smart running
in the background. However, even before this the inbuilt Web-OPAC was easy to
use and clear, which students and lecturers found beneficial.
The
on-line account management functions have helped to reduce the pressure of work
on frontline staff. During the final term of the 2007/8 academic year our
on-line reservation requests accounted for over 50% of all requests for the
first time.
In trials the “users who borrowed this also borrowed…†function of the Web OPAC
proved to be very popular and this is something that we would like to bring
through into Aquabrowser as well.â€
Infor Library and Information Solutions has been at the
forefront of library technology for over three decades. Our information
management and automation solutions are installed in public, academic and
special libraries across the globe, including Europe, Australia and North
America. www.libraries.infor.com