The past few months we’ve been experiencing some changes at work. We’ve had some staff turnover, rearranged many staff and patron areas in the library building, and we are adding more services online. It has been an interesting experience so far, with more to come. One thing I hope we will start doing better is managing the changes with more staff and user input.
Another area in which we need to improve is communicating changes and expanded service offerings. Currently we don’t really have a way to share with the rest of our campus community when we have additions in service, changes in staff, physical changes to the building, add new products, revamp the website, etc…. We tried adding a feed from our blog to the front page of the library website, but content was not updated regularly, so in the latest iteration, that feature went away. In years past a newsletter was shared with faculty and staff, but it has been a few years since that last occurred. We have sent very little to students either.
We can’t justifiably lament a service not being used if we don’t tell people we have it. So, hopefully we will have some good discussions on what type of changes we communicate in advance, what things we highlight as having recently changed, and when we involve others in the dialog. And then, start communicating!