Why perception matters

I am wary of putting myself the "academic librarian" box in terms of what I blog about, so I hesitate to post two academic library-related blogs in two days.

Nevertheless, I had to blog when I read this post on ACRLog about The Princeton Review's list of best academic libraries. You can view the list here. One must complete a free registration to view the list.

(You could also probably get a "free" user name and password from here. But I'm encouraging you to be a good citizen.)

The only criteria for ranking on the list is "students' assessment of library facilities."

I am curious by what Princeton Review means when it says "library facilities" and, furthermore, what students actually commented on. I wonder if a library's ranking on the list was directly related to how many computers a library has and whether the study spaces are nice.

It got me thinking, though, about how our students view the library.

Not to oversimplify my take on things, but I think that students can be broken down into three categories:
1. Students who go to college and care more about academic achievement than about social development.
2. Students who are more interested in social development than academic achievement.
3. Students who are interested in both academic achievement and well-rounded social development.

Having said that, I wonder if the makeup of a student body is directly related to how they view the library.

Students who are more interested in academic achievement than social development might be looking primarily at a library's collection (both physical and virtual) and how that collection can meet his or her needs.

Students who are more interested in social development than academic achievement might be looking primarily at a library's physical spaces and how conducive the are to meeting a student's social needs (can I work in a group? can I be noisy?).

Students who are equally interested in both academic achievement and social development might be looking at both the physical space and the collections.

I don't know any of this for certain, though. I'm just throwing it out there.

It stands to reason, then, that a school might be ranked based on how well it responds to the varied needs of its student population. But, you ask, if users want both good spaces *and* good collections, how do we meet anyone's needs without going broke?

I think that it's hard to please all of your users all of the time and inadvisable to please some of your users all of the time. I suspect, though, if you're able to give a large part of your users some of what they need, they'll look more kindly upon you.

This is not to say that you shouldn't take seriously the desire to meet every user's needs. I think you should. But I do think that it's unrealistic to think that you can do everything for everybody all of the time. Budgets sometimes don't allow for nice spaces *and* nice collections. But, if you find ways to address your users needs--for instance purchasing access to the most desired database as well as adding a few more group-friendly work spaces--they will give you more mulligans for the times you fall short.

In my mind, being user-centered is as much about delivering the goods as it is showing a good faith effort to deliver the good.