December 1, 2010Steering Committee Meeting

Produced byRe-Imagining Services Task Force

  User-Centered Services at the UIC University Library: Definition and Vision Statement

Definition. User-centered services are library functions that users and library staff design in collaboration. These reflect the perspectives of multiple, diverse users of these services and the products that they generate.

 Vision. The UIC University Library commits itself to design all functions and perform all operations as user-centered services.

Undergraduate students Graduate Students Faculty and staff Clinicians and Researchers General public and alumni (with

specific interests regarding: consumer health , government information, community organizations, public schools, general research, others)

Statistics/Analysis produced by the University. produced by the University's office of Institutional Research – which establishes the basic demographic picture (or persona) of UIC students, researchers, staff and faculty.

Statistics/Analysis produced by associations and/or multi-institutional organizations. Comparison among UIC’s peer institutions. Includes the Association of Research Libraries and the  Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries: The Annual Statistics of Medical School Libraries in the United States and Canada (Annual Statistics.) CARLI and CIC might be useful resources as well.

Statistics/Analysis produced by UIC Library's programs and services.Circulation statistics (figuring out who borrows our material and where they might come from, as well as how much the borrow, when, and the kinds of borrowing), technical processing stats, financial information, reference and instruction. User statistics generated by the various vendors and databases we purchase.

Statistics/Analysis produced by other associations and collaborations. OCLC, the Pew Charitable Trust, various library associations, among others -- measures and describes the different qualities and conditions of libraries and their communities.

Use surveys such as “LibQual” to measure library performance

Draw upon disciplinary-based surveys and analyses created by professional societies◦ Examples: Association of American Medical Colleges,

American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, Association of Schools of Public Health, American Dental Association National League for Nursing, American Planning Association.  

Reviews of literature on the information, such as those seeking behavior of health professionals recently compiled by Mary Shultz  

A wide range of direct services offered by UIC Libraries

These are direct investments by the Library that enable students, staff, faculty, researchers, clinicians, and the general public to fulfill their teaching, learning and research goals. None are mutually exclusive.

Thinking about these qualities as investments suggests ways to be more efficient and flexible in how the Library deploys services in the future.

The library enables its users to maximize their use of space and time to study, research, and collaborate

This physical capacity allows the library to arrange particular services (reference, circulation, reserves, collections, study areas) in ways useful and predictable for users.

This time capacity allows users to access and incorporate digital resources around the clock.

Collection acquisition, development and management allows the library to leverage its purchasing power to access, or own, very expensive (or hard to find) scholarly resources.

It also establishes the library as the steward for generations of users sustainable availability to wellsprings of knowledge of the academic disciplines grow, die, or morph into new areas

It assumes a deep capacity to take full advantage of technological and telecommunication enhancements.

the traditional “public” services -- reference, point of use instruction, integrated teaching with core curricula, research assistance, and other forms of outreach now demands effective deployment in both physical and digital realms.

The librarians’ subject expertise will need to be made more obvious in both realms.

The rapidly shifting nature of knowledge discovery and organizational tools (cataloging and bibliographic control in the old school parlance.) The web-based social technologies reaches more users, but it also displaces the library as mediator.

what to do about the catalog vs. the searching interfaces of our subsidized databases. The centrality of the online catalog is no longer obvious to users.

A part of the Library's strategic vision, the Library: seeks a leadership role to collect, organize and

preserve, and make available aspects of the Chicago metropolitan area history and culture;

active in sustaining health knowledge around the state through the medical colleges and departments, hospital and clinics, as well the National Network of Libraries of Medicine Greater Midwest Region.

has the primary responsibility as UIC’s archival service and resource for institutional planning

Each of these depend on the success of the other three investments, yes, but this fourth investment demands their own set of, relationships, outreach, perspectives and collaborative planning.

Using evidence-based data analysis, the task force anticipates how the Library can take advantage of its human and technical resources to re-imagine --

Services and expertise directly related to teaching (both in the library and in the curriculum.)

Services and expertise directly related to point-of-use interactions with the users (whether in a building or digitally) .

Services and expertise to directly leverage purchased and acquired knowledge resources to be more widely available, transparent and useful to users, (e.g. catalogs, databases, government information, user guides, displays and other deliberate attempts to make our resources more obvious to users.)