Responses to 2016 Survey Comments

Thank you for all your comments about the coffee shop -- your suggestions show that you value the coffee shop, which we’re glad to hear! The cafe has only been open for a year and a half, and we look forward to seeing it continue to evolve to meet your needs. 

Meriwether Godsey, the university’s dining services provider, operates the coffee shop, and we have passed along your comments and suggestions to them. We understand that your biggest concerns revolve around the quality of the drinks, the number of available hours, and the selection of food products, and MG is aware of all of these concerns. We have shared your comments with MG. 

Lee McMillan, director of dining services, has contacted Greenberry’s about additional training for the student assistants who work at the coffee shop. In addition, dining services is sending over a variety of more nutritious items, such as Kind Bars, Yogurt granola bars and Kashi bars. They will monitor sales to see if these items address the concerns about the food selection. 

For a variety of reasons (a desire to not compete with the Moody coffee shop; the availability of student workers; a drop-off in sales after 9 p.m.), no additional hours are currently planned for the coffee shop. 

We will keep you informed of any additional changes, as MG continues to fine-tune the service and offerings of the coffee shop. 

Two things stand out from the survey: some of you wish the library to be more quiet, and more of you than ever are using the library! Many of you also like our new quiet floor policy, which designates the third floor for quiet study after 6 p.m.

The library’s first and second floors are going to be a little noisier by nature. They contain service points such as the CLE, Reference and Circulation desks, Greenberry’s, and collaborative spaces: classrooms and group study tables.

Now we know the quiet floor policy is working we’ll do our best to widely advertise the availability of quiet space on third, and in the study rooms throughout the building. We also want everyone to know about our latest option: comfy beanbag chairs and a writeable wall in a far and quiet corner of the ground floor.

Finally, while we do not routinely patrol the building shushing everyone, we are happy to help you if someone’s behavior is disturbing your studies. Text us at (540) 999-4821 or ask at the reference or circulation desk, and we will gently suggest a lower volume J 

 

Thank you for your question about providing more YA materials for leisure reading. You’re correct in supposing that the majority of our budget goes to databases, journals, books and films to support the curriculum – it does. But we do know Hollins students love to read, and we want you to know we have heard your requests! We have started a project: Circulation Coordinator Karen Ryan, with the help of our student employees, will be selecting more YA titles to add to the library’s bestseller and permanent collections.

We will also reach out to you, our readers, more often to ask what you’d like to read. But you don’t need to wait: we’ll gladly hear your suggestions for must-read titles or authors any time. Submit your suggestions via the library website, the suggestion box on the library’s first floor, text us at (540) 999-4821 or email Karen Ryan at ryankj@hollins.edu.

No library, no matter how large, has the resources to buy or subscribe to everything published, but while we can’t guarantee we own the material you’re looking for, we will do our best to get what you need as quickly as possible. 

Roanoke College’s collection is immediately available, through our courier service that makes daily delivery runs of materials every weekday. Interlibrary Loan can usually get any book you need within a week or two, while article requests can generally be filled within days, if not hours. 

We also encourage your suggestions for specific titles you think should be added to our collection.

We appreciate your input and have taken steps to make the site more user-friendly. For instance, this past academic year the library;
1.       Administered a survey about the website to try to understand what students like and dislike about the site.
2.       Ran in-person usability testing with students to see where the pain-points are when using the site. 
3.       Conducted a questionnaire about the organization of the site, so that the navigation and structure best fits your expectations. 

Using all the data above, we released a new website in the fall. We’ve done our due diligence to improve the site, but understand there may still be some confusion about using it. James Miller, our site administrator would love to hear your feedback on improving your experience of using the library’s website. millerjc@hollins.edu

We could always use more printers, and we will pass your comments to the campus Information Technology department, but we also know that printers cost money! We do feel fortunate to have two printers in the library, and we encourage students, if one printer is crowded or out of service, to check the other library printer. One is on the first floor in the coffee commons, and the other is on the second floor at the opposite end of the building: when you send a job to the printer, you can pick it up at either one. As for printer technical problems, please inform us about the problem, so we can either address it or immediately report it to IT. 

Due to space limitations, we are unable to install desktop computers in our study rooms and encourage you to bring your own laptop. Need a laptop charger? Stop by the circulation desk where we have a variety of chargers to match your laptop or tablet, and plenty of outlets in each room.

Sorry you feel that way! We think we have a strong set of resources, for all material types (from journals to books to films and beyond), but we also acknowledge that there’s a lot of different search engines and databases to get familiar with on the library website. Our articles and databases page provides customized database recommendations based on your subject of research. Plus, our librarians specialize in helping guide students to the right databases and resources for their needs – if you encounter any questions or difficulties, come talk to us at the reference desk or e-mail your subject librarian.

We understand the desire to use the library at any time of day; it’s a wonderful place to work, and we love it.

However, as you know, we don’t have an unlimited budget or staff, meaning that we have to make hard decisions about how we deploy our resources and which hours we are open.

One major limiting factor for us is that we do not have a separate room within the library that has outside access and that can be locked apart from the rest of the library. Thus, if we want to extend hours, we must have staff in the building to ensure the security of the library’s resources.

We regularly track and evaluate the number of people in the library during the course of the day (at least one week every semester is set aside for tracking . At this point, we do not see that usage justifies any extra hours during the academic semesters. For example, we have very few people in the library on Fridays and Saturdays, making it difficult to argue for extending hours in the evenings those days. When we extend our hours before and during finals weeks, we see rapidly decreasing library usage after 11 p.m., making it hard for us to consider extending hours past midnight throughout the semester. If we desired to extend hours, we would need to ask the HU administration for additional staff and funds, and right now we don’t think we could justify such a request. 

We do hope to extend summer semester hours, by opening at 8 a.m. instead of 8:30, to give graduate students the time to print materials prior to their 9 a.m. classes. This will be dependent on having money available.

Please do continue to let us know when you want to use the library, and show us with your presence in the library that you value what the library offers. We will continue to listen, and do our best, within our resource constraints, to meet your needs. 

Thanks for your suggestions. Based on the responses from the survey, we are going to raise awareness about our less used services, specifically our app, Hollins Digital Commons, vending machines, and chargers. We plan to post information about these services throughout the library and Moody through "Did you know..." signs. Be on the lookout for those around campus!

We have a wonderful group of student workers that endeavor to make your experience in the library as smooth as possible. Please understand there is equipment in the library that is not serviced by the library staff or student workers, particularly the printers. We strive to help you navigate the printer’s quixotic navigation screen; we will do our best to train our student workers the tips and tricks of the printer/copier/scanner. If the printer has mechanical/electronic/networking issue that is beyond a simple solution such as of turning it off and on again, the IT department will to be notified by our staff or student workers as soon as possible. Please feel free to email the Circulation Coordinator, Karen Ryan (ryankj@hollins.edu), with any questions or comments regarding the library’s student employees.

We love that you love our charger service, and have suggestions for making our service even better. We are ready to charge you up!

MacBook and iPhone 5 & 6 users: We have you covered! All “L” charging cords are available at the circulation desk. We purchased magnetic adaptor units that allow our former “L” charging cords to charge the latest models.
Android smartphone users: We continue to have micro-USB power banks available!

PC laptop users: With the wide variety of PC laptops that are available on the market, often with separate chargers from one another, we cannot guarantee that we will have your particular model, however we endeavor to keep our options up-to-date. If you find we do not have your particular model of PC’s charger, please contact Karen Ryan at ryankj@hollins.edu and let her know of your laptop’s make and model.

In response to the request for out-of-library use of the chargers, we want to maintain our in-library-use policy for now to ensure that the chargers are available to everybody who needs one in the library. 

While we make every reasonable attempt to find the resources you are requesting, sometimes this is simply not possible.  It may be a case where few libraries own the material and those that do are unable or unwilling to lend, or  that the amount the lenders  will charge to lend their material exceeds  our budget  to pay for an item, or it may be that the material is too new, (or sometimes too old and fragile),  and in the case of articles, licensing restrictions may apply. If ILL cannot supply a needed item, please reach out to your subject librarian or the reference desk to discuss alternatives. 

Having a second drop box on campus is a great idea.  However, the cost for a drop box runs about $4,000!  We currently believe that this money could be better used for other library resources such as books and databases.  

We are exploring how we could provide the convenience of multiple book drop points without the high cost. You might be interested in knowing that we are considering offering a mobile book return at the end of each semester, perhaps in Moody or around the dorms, when the need is greatest.

Thanks for the suggestion. We are working with Campus IT to get new printers and have passed along requests to simplify the interface (touch screen) as much as possible so they are easier to use. The library is also planning on creating better documentation (posters near the printers), which walk you through the steps and functions to print or scan. We will have students involved with this process of creating documentation. Remember, you can always ask library staff for assistance.

Our printers are provided by the Information Technology department, and we thank them for working with us to provide both the desktop computers and printers in the library. The library would love to have a printer on the third floor, in addition to the ones we have on the first and second floor. IT is considering adding a third printer to the library in the summer of 2017 -- IT’s decision will be based on an evaluation of usage of the current printers, in addition to the cost of adding a third printer.

Great idea, and we can do this! We have placed boxes of tissues for patron use in strategic places throughout the library: if you need a tissue, and don’t see any, ask. Thank you for this suggestion.

We understand your frustration with the one elevator, and we feel much the same way.  We would truly love to have another one, but, unfortunately, architectural space constraints and financial constraints make it impossible to add another elevator. We encourage those who can take the stairs to take the stairs, so that others who must use the elevator have easy access to it. 

Thank you for your suggestion! We buy films first to support the Hollins curriculum, in consultation with the Film faculty. If additional funds remain we will try to add more African American films. If you have title suggestions, please email them to Maryke Barber, the Arts Librarian, at mbarber@hollins.edu or submit them via the suggestion box across from the library’s first floor Circulation desk.

We agree that it's frustrating to get mix-messages about the university on snow days. Unfortunately, the university's text-messaging system cannot be changed to include information about the library (we asked!), which is why we must rely on the library's social media accounts and my.hollins to let students know if/when we will be open.

On a snow day it will take us a little bit of time to figure the library's hours, but rest assured that we will do our best to publicize if we are open or closed that day. Information about our snow day hours will be:

- On the library's twitter account (@HollinsULibrary), and our twitter feed is on the library's homepage.
- On facebook (Wyndham Roberston Library)
- Posted on my.hollins