We’ve featured LibQUAL+ related infographics on Librarian Design Share before, and want to continue sharing examples of academic libraries that are making survey results public. Transparency is important, and the more we share what we do and how our users perceive our spaces, collections, and services, the more opportunity we have to make improvements.
Continue reading “Sharing Your Results: LibQUAL+Infographic”
Assessment isn’t easy, and sometimes the hardest part of measuring your effectiveness is getting patrons to take a survey. When our library embarked on the LibQual survey last month, we had a goal to reach more patrons that we had in 2010. We agreed that a marketing campaign was the best way to accomplish this, and that our catch-phrase would be “Let Us Know,” which is simple, but exactly what we wanted patrons to do. So I got busy making designs to promote our LibQual.
Whenever I start to create something, I look for other examples out there for inspiration. I found these amazing designs from a French library (and then of course I had to Google translate to understand the text!):
These marketing signs were unlike any others I had seen, and I knew I wanted to create something similar for our library. In the designs above, you are asked if you prefer your library one way or another…I didn’t have a lot of staff to stage pictures, so I used the pictures we already have. My designs don’t compare services, but each one does ask a question straight from the LibQual survey.
I placed eight different variations of this design around the library to catch patrons’ eyes, but to remain consistent in design and message. I furthered our library “brand” by using orange, the color we use on our handouts, website, and instructional materials. Our patrons are pretty used to seeing “library orange” these days. To continue the message, we used the phrase, “Let Us Know” with an orange picture in emails to faculty, staff, and students, and we placed this banner on our website:
So how did it go? Well, we increased our respondent rate by 25% from years past. We can’t directly count the marketing for the increase, but I’d say it didn’t hurt.
What are you doing to promote your library? Have you tried to market your LibQual survey? Share your designs here with us! And, if you would like the original Publisher documents to modify for your library, contact me.
So much of the information that we gather about our libraries needs to be shared with our users, but just how do we share it? Meggan Frost, Public Services Librarian at Paul Smith’s College, has given us a great example of visually representing data gathered through the formal library assessment LibQual.
Here’s Meggan in her own words:
I created this conference-sized poster (4’x3’) to publicize the findings of our LibQUAL survey. We had incredibly high participation in the survey, and we wanted to make sure that our community understood that we took their responses seriously. I created this poster using InDesign. Initially, I had a hard time conceptualizing how I wanted to present the information. Because the poster is conference-sized, I found it hard to break out of “conference poster” design mode in the beginning. Once I realized that I actually wanted to design something more like an infographic, I was able to quickly sketch out a design that turned into the one you see here. This poster was prominently displayed at the front of the library this fall.
This infographic is much more powerful than the plots, charts, and text that typically makes up a library’s LibQual report, and turning it into a poster to share with her campus community further bolster’s her library’s user-focused attitude.
For the inDesign file of this poster, email Meggan Frost.
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