Providing First-rate Service to Patrons
Covering a large territory of half a million acres in the second most populated county in Colorado, Jefferson County Public Library has to provide excellent patron service across its ten locations. The Library envisions technology as a means to this end through resource-sharing, self-service options, and Web technologies that are manageable and customizable by staff.
“Innovative was prepared to meet our needs from the beginning in 1996,” says Systems Administrator Kathy Halloran. “We asked them to develop Floating Collections to help us cut costs and get books into patrons’ hands more quickly.” Jefferson County was moving tremendous amounts of materials simply to put them back on the shelf after they were borrowed from a remote library. “Right now almost everything in our 1.5-million item collection floats, excluding only a few special collections. This has reduced delivery volume by 67 percent.”
To boost access to books even further, Jefferson County Public Library was the first public library to join an INN-Reach direct borrowing consortium. The consortium, now called Prospector+, has grown to more than 20 million items with 23 participating academic, public, and special libraries in Colorado and Wyoming.
To connect with patrons on the Web, staff conducted focus groups on the usability of Web-based services and used this knowledge to make adjustments to the Millennium online catalog. For example, Jefferson County librarians knew which elements to display at what point in the search process and how to improve the look and feel of retrieved records. “We took advantage of Millennium’s new options for citation displays, the shopping cart for holds, and the ability to accomplish a number of tasks without re-verification,” says Halloran.
Most recently, Jefferson County Public Library has launched a Spanish-language public catalog using Millennium and is exploring wireless library applications with Innovative. “We’re able to use Innovative’s latest technologies to implement our evolving service concept,” says Halloran. “With more self-service in place, we’re able to re-think our services for our newest library, which will open this fall and feature roving reference and more one-on-one help throughout the library. We’re expanding self-service with RFID and Graphical Self Check, Patron Self-Registration, and Ecommerce.”
Halloran says, “Our long-term relationship with Innovative is one of the ways we’ve been able to constantly improve patron service. They’ve provided a spectrum of new products and the everyday problem resolution we need to meet our patron service mission.”
