Libraries are the most important resources for any educational institution. Education and fully paid for education particularly has acquired the status of a service industry and students are variedly viewed as customers. For instance, in the UK, Higher Education (HE) students were treated as the “primary customers” of a University (Crawford, 1991), even before the introduction of the system of paying the tuition fees “up-front”. This customer view of students makes the university offerings open to evaluation for satisfaction and contributes immensely to the image of the university which may have serious students’ retention implications apart from affecting the overall pool of potential entrants to the concerned university and school. As James et al (1999) state that the overall image of a university has a strong impact on the retention of current students and the attraction of potential students. It is also not hard to logically conclude that a university or a school that has a poor image and reputation amongst its existing students and potential students would find it extremely difficult to attract funding and grants which would put the institution in a vicious circle of low funding-poor category students’ pool and make for a loosing commercial and educational proposition. Baker (1997) observed that students primarily utilize libraries to either complete educational and course-related assignments or for intellectual development. In fact, some institutions are known for their rich and wide library resources and enjoy a high image in academic circles on account of this factor alone. As yet, in today’s advanced and information savvy world, most educational institutions make systematic attempts to augment their library resources; however, these institutions are faced with another major problem i.e. low or sub-optimal utilization of such library resources by their students. This problem plagues many large-sized libraries that exist as stand-alone institutions as well. This paper examined the issue of deploying new computer-based technology in the author’s library by assessing a specific part of this technology and software. The technology this paper chose to examine was PC reservation software and the model library examined for review was the SFPL Portola Branch for Library which had implemented this software. This paper also interviewed the librarian of the captioned library to gather an overall view of this software in use.
Several studies in the literature document the use of technology in libraries; however, most of the latest literature concerns the usage of the Internet and/or the other electronic sources of the library (Applebee et al., 2000; Teo, 2001; Adika, 2003; Uddin, 2003) or computer resources at such libraries ( Durndell and Haag, 2002; North and Noyes, 2002; Gordon et al.,2003). In particular, the latter studies document the type of PC reservation software that this paper examined. The model library had implemented this software about three years back. The software enables the library users to book and reserve books from the various PCs located in the university campus facilities online within a Local Area Network. The software has a backbone of network software and the backing of a database of book titles integrated within it. This database is maintained with data on titles that enable rich querying by the clients. The clients sitting, at their location within the campus can browse titles by authors, publishers, year of publication, subject, and well-defined sub-topics within each broad subject area. Having identified their titles the students can go to a link that allows them to check if the title is available for reservation. After ascertaining the availability, the software checks for the following before accepting a reservation: maximum allowable titles per student, the balance of borrowing ability in a borrower’s account, penalty history for the user-primarily from the point of view of any fines that may be outstanding-and only then it clears the reservation. After reservation an acknowledgment can be printed; this acknowledgment indicates the reservation number, date, titles reserved with due dates. It warns the user to obtain physical delivery of the books within three working days of the reservation failing which reservation would be treated as canceled and the titles shifted to the available database. Thus this software obviates the need for physically visiting the library at the time of reservation and improves the time management of students by a good margin. In addition, it also works to provide information to students on their pending returns and fines etc-thus helping the overall library discipline. Particularly at the time of examinations the library is saved from the sudden and unmanageable influx of students. Moreover, students also have access to the database on titles and can narrow their selections down to editions of a particular title apart from having the ability to search other books by the same authors –which helps widen their choice even beyond those prescribed in their classrooms.
The interview with the librarian revealed that the implementation phase for this project was one year. During this one year, the network was designed by an outsourced consultant, and the database was structured and brought by another outsourced specialist. Initially, the software did not update on the borrower histories of users and it also did not throw up other titles by the same author as the one searched primarily. These two features were added subsequently by linking two new servers to the LAN which had the data on these two aspects. This software also had a much broader interface on the internet website of the library; however, this aspect was not examined by the present paper. The librarian was of the view that the PC reservation software had improved usage of the library substantially. An internal report of library use indicated that the titles borrowed per quarter ad improved by a whopping 20 percent in the first year of implementation itself. More improvements in the software, as indicated above, brought about further improvement in borrows. Penalty management had improved as well with the incidence of such penalties registering a nosedive in the first year of implementation and now in the third year of implementation, such penalties were at a record low. More library discipline meant that there was a healthier and greater turnover of titles making for the satisfaction of the average user.
Keeping the above advantages in mind and the ability of the system to manage multiple point title reservations the same system can be replicated with ease in the author’s library. The similarities between the model library and the author’s library are several-most importantly the number of members of both libraries is about the same. The model library manages around 120 PCs on its LAN and the number of PCs in the author’s location is less making the implementation easier. Even the number of titles stocked by the two libraries falls in a close range and is comparable. Moreover, there are plenty of in-house capabilities to develop such software.
References
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