Frontline Services: responding to a changing landscape

A conference created by CAVAL and the CSCN

What is it?
This one-day conference is organised by CAVAL and its Customer Services & Collaboration Network (CSCN). The conference is an opportunity to meet peers from other University and TAFE libraries, make connections, and learn from others how they are responding to a changing landscape in terms of staff, students, services and enquiries, and metrics.

Who should attend?
If frontline services are directly relevant to your work, you should consider attending. The conference is tailored for practitioners – the people actually doing the work. You don’t have to be a particular HEO/HEW level, work in a particular unit, or have a particular title or qualification, but you should come along prepared to fully participate.

What if someone else from my institution wants to attend?
This conference allows for a maximum of 120 attendees, however there are no restrictions on how many people can attend from any CAVAL Member institution or Victorian TAFE library. The conference is free for staff from CAVAL Member institutions and Victorian TAFE libraries. If you attend from another institution, the cost to attend is $88.22 (includes GST and transaction fee).

Wednesday 28 June, 10.00am – 3.00pm AEST

La Trobe University City campus, Level 2, Room 2.15 and 2.16, 360 Collins Street, Melbourne VIC 3000

Through this conference we are seeking to showcase and share the current ways in which libraries are responding to change in frontline services in four key areas: students, staff, services and enquiries, and metrics.

• Students: Students are central to the work we do. How are we partnering with students? How do we centre the student experience? How are we including the student voice?
• Staff: What current skills do we expect from our frontline services staff? How have roles in frontline services changed? How are we recruiting differently? What has been your experience as someone who has recently recruited or has recently been recruited yourself?
• Services & enquiries: What is currently impacting our frontline services? How have we responded or transformed our services in light of recent changes? (e.g. Artificial intelligence, impact of COVID on our digital service offering, returning to campus delivery this year)
• Metrics: What metrics do we collect and why? What do we want to know from our data? How do we collect qualitative data on the student experience? How are we using data to inform decision making or to shape our services? How can we use data to demonstrate our value?

The conference will bring the attendees a mix of presentations and workshops delivered by CAVAL member institutions, as well as a chance to network in person. While the timings of the program are yet to be confirmed, you will find presentation and workshop details below.

Presentations

How many ways can I help you?
Dianne Jones, Library Frontline Services Officer, Federation University

The Library Frontline Services team at Federation University has been involved in a major change to the services offered to their current students. In June 2022 a decision was made to bring the face-to-face functions of student administration into the Library InfoPoint services. In two weeks, they team had to comprehend the enrolment, re-enrolment, fee payment, international student conditions and more, in addition to learning four very different databases, CRM, MyStudentCentre, etc.

Semester two 2022 began with a bang and the stress levels of the team escalated. Semester one of 2023 was busier than they had ever been. The team survived this onslaught, their statistics tripled, and their students were very appreciative of the efforts they made, for the most part. Their foray into balancing two roles was not plain sailing and they now find after a Consultancy that many of these tasks will be returning to the student administration site that they came from. Dianne’s journey with customer service has been a mix of emotions ranging from simple joy through to calming an upset client and being able to consistently produce a result that satisfies both herself and the client.

Can You Go? Building staff skills in new teams and changing service delivery
David Smith-Chitty, Frontline Services Coordinator, Monash University
Mayssa Matley, Frontline Services Coordinator, Monash University

One of the challenges in responding to the changing environment in Frontline Services delivery has been ensuring staff have both the skills and infrastructure to answer any user queries. This presentation will cover the experiences and lessons at Monash University Library over the last two years as they brought together multiple teams and locations into a 'One Library' Frontline team, and as they continue to develop their approach to ensure their staff continue to deliver high quality services.

Finding and Fostering Creativity, Community and Care in Co-Curricular Client Experience and Engagement work: Lessons from Unexpected Journeys to Frontline Library Services
Louis Bendtsen, Library Officer, Deakin University
Clare O’Hanlon, Client Experience Librarian, Deakin University

At the start of 2023, Clare and Louis were inspired by Deakin Library's new vision and plan to "enable a vibrant, rich and inclusive ideas eco-system to flourish within Deakin, and contribute to the creation of a more informed, progressive and socially-just society globally" and embarked on new chapters in the Client Experience team at Deakin Library.

The presenters will share lessons they have learnt from their careers in and beyond libraries related to power, pedagogy and partnerships that have helped them find and foster creativity, community, and care in frontline services work to support and empower each other and their communities across campuses and in the cloud. They hope to help participants identify the transferrable skills they bring to frontline library services work and build their confidence in presenting, facilitating and teaching.

At the frontline with generative artificial intelligence
Michael Huang, Library Service Officer, The University of Melbourne
Tamara Drazic, Library Service Officer, The University of Melbourne

Generative AI chatbots like OpenAI ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing and Google Bard have reached millions of users in a few months. How are academic library frontline services responding to this new technology? What are the opportunities and risks with current and future versions?    

Metrics: It doesn’t have to be boring
Dana Perryman, Senior Campus Librarian, Melbourne Polytechnic

Since its inception in 2019, the Library and Learning Skills Metrics Team has worked on refining its metrics collection and reporting. The presentation will discuss how the Melbourne Polytechnic Library ‘hybrid’ service has used metrics to convey the story of what they do, how they expand their accessibility impact and their global inclusion of diverse cohorts in Australia and internationally. Additionally, it will emphasise the importance of fostering a metrics mindset among staff at all levels and highlight the benefits of easily accessible metrics for management, including service promotion and decision-making.  

Speakers

Dianne Jones, Library Frontline Services Officer, Federation University

Dianne has worked in Academic, Special, Medical, and other Libraries over the span of her career. Her roles have all been customer service oriented and have included the installation of LMS’s, Liaison, Training, Teaching, and supporting colleagues. Dianne is a highly motivated individual who is productive and positive in the working environment. She is  very effective when it comes to balancing warmth with professionalism. Dianne has been working at Federation University Library – Berwick campus since February 2022 and work with a small close-knit team.

David Smith-Chitty, Frontline Services Coordinator, Monash University

David is currently a Frontline Services Coordinator for Monash University and has 10+ years’ experience across both Frontline and Academic Services. He is interested in staff development, training and collaborating with other library teams.

Mayssa Matley, Frontline Services Coordinator, Monash University
Mayssa is a Frontline Services Coordinator based at the Monash University Caulfield Campus. She hates writing bios so much that this is all she's submitting. Say hello if you have a question and she promises to be friendly.

Louis Bendtsen, Library Officer, Deakin University

Louis has recently taken the first steps on his dream career path of librarianship. His professional background has seen him deliver customer service in varied and unique settings before later devising and training others in how to do the same. From luxury hospitality in the middle of the Australian outback to crisis support work with the homeless across two years of the pandemic, servicing the needs of others has always been the driving passion behind his career choices. Now on his way to completing a Bachelor in the field, he’s stepped into the tertiary library space and is thrilled to be utilising years of carefully crafted experience to assist and empower students at Deakin University.

Clare O’Hanlon, Client Experience Librarian, Deakin University

Clare started their journey in academic libraries by launching into a learning and teaching liaison focused role at La Trobe University Library. Restructuring during the pandemic led them to do more frontline work in addition to liaison work in the past few years. Looking back, they realised that many of the projects they were part of at La Trobe were related to co-curricular client experience and engagement - from social media communications, alumni services and special collections to open scholarship advocacy, orientation programming and beyond. Inspired by this, Deakin Library’s plan, their volunteer work in community archives by night, and experiencing burnout from liaison work, they decided to embark on a new chapter. They feel more optimistic about the future of academic libraries than they have felt in a long time.

Michael Huang, Library Service Officer, The University of Melbourne

Michael is a Library Service Officer at the Baillieu Library and the ERC Library at the University of Melbourne. He previously worked at Melbourne Polytechnic as a Liaison Librarian and Campus Librarian. Michael is interested in improving access to information through technology and the open access movement.

Tamara Drazic, Library Service Officer, The University of Melbourne

Tamara works in the Arts Library Service Officer team based in the Baillieu Library. She has a keen interest in the way frontline services adapt to fit the changing needs of the community they serve. Tamara has degrees in both fine arts and information management and came to the University of Melbourne after working predominantly in school libraries.

Dana Perryman, Senior Campus Librarian, Melbourne Polytechnic

Dana is the Senior Campus Librarian at Melbourne Polytechnic and assists in the supervision of the frontline library services. She also leads the Library and Learning Skills Metrics team, and a not-so-secret love of data and analytics has led to the commencement of studies in Data Science. She loves supporting staff and students to improve their digital literacy and to see the confidence that grows as a result.

Workshop

Design Thinking 101: centering the student experience
Andy Hurt, Senior Librarian, Library Services and Spaces, The University of Melbourne
Kylie Tran, Manager, Library Services and Spaces, The University of Melbourne

Design Thinking allows us to work together to discover what our library users want and experiment to create and improve our services, programs and processes that meet their evolving needs. This workshop will give participants a hands-on introduction to design thinking in the context of frontline services. It will be fun, fast-paced, and practical.

Facilitators

Andy Hurt, Senior Librarian, Library Services and Spaces, The University of Melbourne

Andy has worked in libraries for over 30 years in student facing roles. She is also a Master of Communication student. By day she uses critical thinking, research and writing skills in her job. By night she is inspired by music, art, film, and theatre to think deeply about society and politics, particularly social justice. A fan of blogging and social media, she sees communication and connection as central to relationship building.

Kylie Tran, Manager, Library Services and Spaces, The University of Melbourne

Kylie is Manager of Library Services and Spaces at University of Melbourne and has worked in a variety of roles in University and TAFE libraries over the past 15 years. They have an interest in Design Thinking and how it can be applied in libraries, and dedicates their spare time to Đất Nước Library, a community-curated library based in Footscray which showcases texts and other outputs by creatives from Vietnam and the diaspora.