People's Network
Monitoring and evaluation
Impact measures
The People’s Network programme in public libraries has enhanced the credibility of the library service by helping libraries to reposition themselves at the heart of the community. Case studies suggest that the People’s Network is attracting new kinds of users to public libraries including people from groups categorised as socially or digitally excluded – unemployed people, asylum seekers, refugees, BME groups and people with a disability. Take up of the People’s network has been identified as the measure which will be used to demonstrate public libraries’ delivery of the Stronger and Safer Communities Shared Priority. More detailed information on impact measures is available on the MLA website.
MLA chairs the IPF ePLUS steering group and the latest version of this member of the PLUS family together with background notes is available to members on the IPF market research website http://www.ipfmarketresearch.net.
Website statistics
We automatically gather and store the following information about site visitors so that we can monitor the use of the website to help us make improvements:
- The Internet Protocol (IP) address from which people access our website.
- The name of the domain from which people access the internet (e.g. aol.com, if you are connecting from an America Online account).
- The type of browser and operating system used to access our website.
- The date and time of each visit to the site.
- The pages, files, documents and links that are visited.
- The internet address of the website from which visitors linked to our site (i.e. the previous site visited before coming to us).
Site user feedback form
In the near future an online feedback form will be added to the contact us page to capture people's feedback about the website and its services. Any feedback will help to inform future developments and improvements.
Enquire service monitoring
An excellent understanding of how Enquire is being used is gained from the transcripts and service logs. These are regularly analysed by the service delivery managers and feedback is given to participating libraries periodically about good practice and any training issues which might need to be addressed in order to ensure a high quality of customer service provision.
Library staff also have access to their own session transcripts and these can be used to evaluate the service locally and help for the purposes of training and mentoring staff.
For user confidentiality, personal information is removed from the transcripts after 30 days – see protecting your privacy on the public web pages for further information.
The service delivery managers also conduct user and staff surveys about Enquire to capture additional qualitative information to find out what people thought, in order to help improve customer focus and refine the design of the service.
Information on Enquire is also gathered through server logs further analyse use of the website, diagnose server issues and make sure that services are offering people what they want.
All this helps us generate an abundance of information about how the service is being used on a national basis and how we might improve the quality of service being delivered.
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