Library Loop

Considering the library feedback in the National Student Survey

Final year undergraduate students will have received their invitation to complete the National Student Survey (NSS) with responses open till 30th April 2022.  The NSS is a big opportunity to get a picture of how people are feeling across a wide range of aspects of their time at university.  

You will be unsurprised to read that we pay particular attention to NSS Q19.  “The library resources (e.g. books, online services and learning spaces) have supported my learning well.” But we also look at related questions on access to resources as well as those relating to IT.

The headlines for 2021 on Q19 were not great.  With covid impacting on all our lives the university experience was very different to what people were expecting.

We saw our overall satisfaction score fall to 74% from 87% the year before (the 2020 survey was just ending when the first lockdown began).  We were expecting a drop as we were not able to operate in the free flowing way people have been used to earlier in their courses. We were heartened to see that the change in satisfaction was not wildly higher or lower than those at other university libraries – everyone shared in similar struggles.  With less disruption this year we can hope to see some improvement though as students are asked to reflect on their experience over their whole course, people will likely have the toughest times somewhat in mind.

The Q19 score is a useful indicator but much more helpful for us are the many comments we receive related to our services.  These come from an open invite for people to share a positive side to their studies, a negative one and a piece of advice or information for someone coming to King’s.  We look at these closely, monitoring changes each year and considering how things vary in different Faculties and Departments.  With hundreds of comments we won’t tackle them all here but there were two dominant themes to explore.

Access to the Library / opening hours.  

Over the years we have steadily increased our opening hours to the point where most of our libraries were open 24/7 for much of the year.  This was reflected in us receiving no comments about opening hours at all in 2020.  Following the period of general closure of buildings across the university we reopened ahead of the new academic year operating a covid safe model in line with the university wide guidance.  This meant a much more restricted set of opening hours with a booking based model to support track and trace while managing access for those on campus (spot the QR code in the Round Reading Room picture).  We worked through the year to steadily increase hours and capacity while making things progressively more flexible.  It was a great relief to be able to set the booking model aside before this academic year started.

Our opening hours are also back to most libraries being open most of the time.  We all hope we don’t need to go back to anything like that in the future!

Access to books, articles and other materials.  

With access restricted and many of you working remotely from campus there were a lot of comments in this area.  When the pandemic struck we moved rapidly to ensure access to core reading material was maintained by sourcing electronic versions where possible in time for teaching.  This saw us adding in excess of 100,000 additional ebooks to our collection over the past two years. The NSS comments show some appreciation for how much we were able to make available but also frustration that not all readings could be there at a click. 

Gaps can be due to a combination of factors – and what we encountered mostly was ebooks not being available at all through publishers, or being made available quite late in the academic year.  We also encountered licences that were highly restrictive meaning a limited number of people could read the text at the same time. In some instances we were able to improve this by purchasing access to large collections curated by publishers with better access terms, which would also contain material not required as core, or by working with publishers to relax the licence restrictions on individual ebooks.
Where core reading was simply unavailable in an electronic format, we worked with academics to identify essential chapters of texts so that we could create copyright compliant digitised copies that could be uploaded to the reading list. In the early days of the pandemic some publishers offered wider access to parts of their collections for a limited period, which will likely have caused confusion once the publisher withdrew access again. The university provided increased funds to support additional access and we continue to invest to provide more online readings.  Overall the number of positive comments on eresources rose substantially and we hope to build on this. 

Alongside whether we have access to a book or journal electronically you told us about the challenges of finding and getting into online resources.   The two key points we manage for smoothing this journey are LibrarySearch and MyReadingLists.  

LibrarySearch is the one stop shop to find books, ebooks, journal articles and more through a single search box.  Developing this is a priority in the coming year with consideration of how to link to floorplans to help you find books on the shelf, enhancements to the journal search and potentially a streamlined system for accessing PDFs.  We've introduced a new autorenew feature for books you have on loan, saving you from needing to worry about this till you are either finished with the book or it is needed by a fellow student.

The importance of MyReadingLists (the system we use with your lecturers to provide details of the readings for course modules) as a route to accessing resources means this is a priority for development and we hope to have plans to share in the coming year.  The aim will be to increase interactivity and make things much more visible in Keats reducing the number of places you need to look.    

Finally, recognising that not everything is going to be available online for the foreseeable (and some things may never be) there were a number of comments on printed books.  The comments were dominated by the impact of covid on access rather than issues with the range and depth of titles available.  During the period of restricted access to campus we offered a click and collect service fetching books that were requested.  This was a temporary measure that lasted longest at the Maughan due to the particular challenges posed by access at that Library.  Browsing access was restored in other libraries from September 2020.  With the end of space booking access went back to normal so we are happy to be able to return our focus to improving the process of finding things (more on this work soon).  

Hopefully this post has given you a feel for some of what we are doing around what you tell us through the NSS.  There is more and we will return to it in future posts.

Share your thoughts through the comments or on Instagram @kings_libraries