Welcome People Services

Awave hello, a question answered with a smile, a walk to join a search for something that couldn’t be found. It is the accumulation of these everyday gestures of kindness that give a library a reputation for exemplary customer service. And if there’s one thing that stands out in all the feedback I get about this library, it is that in dealing with the public our staff goes beyond professionalism and courtesy by adding a personal touch. As one customer wrote recently, “I get the sense that the people who work in the library genuinely care about me as a person.”

For this year’s Impact Report, we wanted to focus on the daily interactions at our service desks, to capture those moments, large and small, that leave people with the sense that they are not only being served, but appreciated. We decided to take a journalistic approach and station a writer and a photographer at three of our services desks for an hour on three different days and report what happens during that hour.

Since most interactions at our services desks are recorded using a specific-to-libraries application called Gimlet, we were able to identify some of our busiest times when scheduling our writer and photographer. Our hope was to capture the stories behind the data, to see how interactions at the desk translated into answers to questions that connected people with our services — and to do so organically. In the process, you’ll meet a few of our customers, some of whom were kind enough to take a few minute to share.

As you go through the pages, please note that the layout you see here will be repeated in the spreads: a timeline and statistics will be in this column, with people and services in the other two columns.

We’re open 4,320 minutes each week. Here are what 180 of those minutes looked like on one Wednesday evening, one Thursday morning and one Sunday afternoon in March, 2023.

Jennifer Podolsky Executive Director

IN THIS COLUMN you’ll meet the people who worked the service desks during the hours we selected. Staff volunteered to participate in this project and were selected based on who was working during the busiest hours as identified by data gathered from the service desk app Gimlet. While we have four service desks on three floors the focus is on one desk on each floor: the Checkout Desk on the first floor, the Information Desk on the second floor and the Youth Services Information Desk on the third floor.

The Answers

This column contains answers to questions posed to staff and services to which they were referred. One common observation by both staff and customers is that the library offers so many services that often the public can only be aware of a fraction of those. Our hope here is that readers will learn about new services and more about the services they’re already using.

YOU’LL ALSO MEET the people who were served by our staff and hear from some about how they feel about us. All but one person who interacted at the service desks agreed to be photographed. Most shared some onthe-spot remarks and said it was OK to check back with them for additional comments after publication.

Stats

Statistics cited in this report related to questions answered at service desks came from Gimlet, a statisticstracking app used by the library.