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Developing Standards for Our Services

By Bethan Smith, on 7 June 2022

This is the first of a series of blogposts to update colleagues on the work of the Services Standards Working Group.

Implementing measurable targets at a service-level has been a long-standing ambition within Library Services. By measuring how we are performing against agreed criterial, we can more easily celebrate our successes, build business cases, and target areas for service improvement. Building on the recent work on the public facing, top-level service standards page, we are now directing our attention to creating and implementing standards for each of the services we provide.

In January 2022, a Service Standards Working Group was set up to test the implementation of library service level standards via a pilot scheme, with Sarah Aitchison, Peter Dennison, Thomas Meehan, Bethan Smith, Alex Stagg, Margaret Stone, Jay Woodhouse and Angela Young all forming membership of the group. This cross-section of representatives ensures that we cover different sections of the library, including Facilities and Projects; Cataloguing and Metadata; NHS Library Services; User Teaching, Training and Skills; Membership; and Special Collections. This group reports to the Service Improvement Steering Committee.

The working group meets monthly to discuss measurable, ambitious, and achievable standards that they wish to set up as part of the pilot. Suggested areas for measurement include satisfaction rates, application turnaround times and usage of our collections. We are aiming to try out these target standards on a pilot scheme basis in the next few months to better understand how to roll out service standards more widely throughout the library.

Upon completion of the pilot phase, the group will publish a series of recommendations on how to implement, measure and publish our standards. Eventually, there is an ambition for every service in the Service Catalogue to have some form of measurable standard in place, following the guidance of this recommendation document and consultation.

As the working group continues to develop its pilot standards, we will post more progress updates soon. In the meantime, if you have any questions or wish to hear more about the working group, please contact Bethan Smith.

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