Keeping count of our enquiries is an important source of information about our services, and helps fuel our improvement. As the semester starts to draw to a close, we took a deeper look at our enquiries data for the beginning of semester 1 2023.
TL Robertson Library is one of the busiest buildings on the Curtin Perth campus – we have an average of 6,400 visitors every day. Many students will walk into the building, scout for a study spot and park themselves to get to work. But we do always have staff available to answer queries about using the Library if they need.
Each interaction at our help desk gets counted and themed, so that we can get a sense for the sort of questions clients will ask. The graph below shows our in-person enquiries from Orientation Week to the end of April this year.
Our most popular enquiry themes are borrowing from our collections (1,237 enquiries) and our facilities, opening hours or access and equipment (1,054 enquiries).
A full bustling Library is a good indicator of service use, however the majority of our service use occurs online – in 2022 we recorded over 4,300,000 searches of our catalogue during the entire year. Students regularly use our online services, and this extends to our online help and support.
Our FAQs are an important facet of our online support services which provide clients with quick, self-service help on-demand. They are ideal for simple, frequent queries which don’t need a staff member’s support.
We collect data on how often our FAQs are viewed – here’s the graph of our top 10 visits for our online FAQs from Orientation Week to the end of April this year:
Our most popular FAQs are about opening hours (1,943 views), accessing our writing support tool Grammarly (928 views) and downloading referencing software EndNote (837 views). Interestingly, our newer FAQ about generative AI tools had a strong start to the year with 760 views.
While the primary focus of our support services is to help clients find the information they need, they also give us a useful source of feedback about our services and information. If a question is asked often it may indicate we need to improve our information on this service or change the way it works. For example, as a result of opening hours queries and feedback we’re investigating how we can extend our opening hours, staffing and space available. This includes increasing the availability of floors and staff across our 24/7 opening hours, and trialling longer opening hours on public holidays.
As we learn about the needs of our clients, we expect enquiries to evolve and change. With a robust method of gathering enquiries data we can continue to provide a responsive Library service.
Written by Sara Culverhouse, Communications Officer
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