Transforming Research Consultations with YouCanBook.Me

I have been working at Joyner Library for over four years now, but about a year ago, I took on a new role. As a new manager, I wanted to look for something to improve upon as one of my first projects. The Research and Instructional Services team had a long-standing research consultation service that provided short one-on-one meetings with a librarian to help find library resources for student, faculty, and staff research projects. The process of setting up a consultation was quite cumbersome for both the librarian and the student. The process went something like this:

Graphic Credit: Katy Webb

This process could take up to four days, depending on how long it took to receive emails back and forth. The extended time between sending the initial form to us and scheduling an appointment meant that there were a lot of no-shows for the sessions. This seemed like a prime place to make an improvement in our processes. Our first attempt at making a change was to try to survey current users of the service. We sent out a survey to all people who had completed a research consultation in the last semester. We only received five responses, which was not enough data to draw any overarching conclusions. Members of the department considered ways to cut out unnecessary steps in the current consultation process. We felt that the main time waster was the process by which librarians email back and forth with students to find an acceptable time. Using our Joyner Library room reservation system as an example, the department felt that the student should have a time that they were supposed to come to meet with a librarian sooner in the process. At the same time that we were collecting survey responses, I happened upon an article in a well-known library trade journal, C&RL News. The author, Amanda Nichols Hess, wrote about how the Oakland University library liaisons were using a product called YouCanBook.Me to set up research consultations. I checked out this product and it seemed like a great fit, but we would have to come up with a lot of internal processes to make it work. At Joyner Library, the RIS librarians are not liaisons in the sense that we are not each considered to be a "subject expert" in a particular field. There is a separate Collection Development department that buys books. Additionally, unlike Oakland University, all of the research consultations come in via one channel and are "doled out" to people based on their other scholastic pursuits and personal interests. The author of the article was using the product to feed into her own Google Calendar, and the university was using enterprise Google products. YouCanBook.Me did seem like the answer to our problems, in that it took much of the work off of the student's shoulders and put it in the librarians' court. Consider again our past process above, and now look at our current process.

 When a student wishes to book a librarian, they will click a link from the “Ask a Librarian” page and be taken to http://joynerlibrary.youcanbook.me . A screenshot of the interface can be seen here.

Screenshot Credit: Katy Webb

Users of the consultation service are given a listing of open times to choose to receive a consultation. These hours correspond with the RIS desk hours, and include more evening hours than were previously possible. Hours begin at 8:00 AM and end at 9:00 PM on days that the library is open 24 hours. Saturday hours are not available, due to the fact that these hours are covered by graduate student employees. Sunday hours begin at 4:00 PM and end at 9:00 PM in order to the evening reference librarian time to prepare for consultations scheduled prior to the Sunday shift. The times are shown in 30 minute blocks. 24-hour advanced notice is required, meaning that students cannot sign up for a consultation on the form that same day. Consultations can be scheduled up to 16 weeks in advance. The appearance of the site is meant to mimic the colors and style of room reservation system. This was done with CSS that was provided by the department in charge of the website.

After choosing a time that works well for them, the student fills out a form. The form is almost exactly the same form as we were using in the past, but we carried it over to YouCanBook.Me. Consultations can be in-person or via telephone, Skype/Google Hangouts or Email.

Screenshot Credit: Katy Webb

The student receives a confirmation email and another email is sent to the person who books consultations for the RIS department. On the back end, YouCanBook.Me feeds a 30-minute meeting with the information from the form into a Google Calendar. This was ideal for Joyner's RIS department, since we already used Google Calendar to show our shared desk calendar. For work email, ECU uses Outlook. We created a new color for the Book a Librarian sessions and these now appear along with the desk schedule (in orange on the image below).

Screenshot Credit: Katy Webb

At times when no librarian is available to take consults, the time can easily be blocked off in the Google Calendar application and the YouCanBook.Me interface will not show those time slots. Students can easily reschedule the sessions by clicking a link in their confirmation email. They are told to show up at the reference desk at their scheduled time.

This new process takes minutes and gives students the instant gratification that they like. Once they are done booking, this is when we do the messy process of finding someone to cover the consultation. The process that we devised goes like this: The scheduling coordinator receives an email from the YouCanBook.Me system. She takes a look at our instruction matrix, which is a document that we use to assign instruction classes. She looks for an appropriate match and then goes into Outlook and schedules a 30-minute meeting with the librarian. She pastes the entirety of the information that the student provided into the meeting request. If the person will not be there for the time that the student scheduled, she can choose a different full time staff member to schedule. After sending the Outlook request, she changes the wording of the Google Calendar meeting from the word "Booked" to the word  "Scheduled" and includes the name of the librarian who has received the Outlook request. Once the librarian is done with the consultation, he or she changes the status to "Completed", or in the case of a no show, "No Show". This helps with statistics later in the month.

We made two other changes to the research consultation service at the same time as we went paperless and moved to YouCanBook.Me. We changed the name from Research Consultation to Book a Librarian. This seemed to make more sense to students, took on the word "book" from YouCanBook.Me and it was a little pun. The other change that we made was to conduct all of the research consultations in our workroom, which is located directly behind our reference desk. We reorganized the room, put a small conference table in there, and mounted a flat-screen all-in-one computer to the wall. YouCanBook.Me is basically an offshoot of our room reservation system, in that the student is actually booking our workroom for 30 minutes.

Although this library idea was not fully our own, the process we created for the back-end has made our consultation service much more accessible to students. We have fewer no-shows, and our consultation bookings have doubled. If you have questions about YouCanBook.Me or want to know more, please feel free to contact me.