The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor had embraced service design and design thinking, but the pandemic-induced campus transition enabled staff to innovate differently. Many services transitioned to virtual options but some onsite library services reopened for Fall 2020. Library employees created a new service model to accommodate request…

Tennessee State University was a decade long user of OCLC's ILLiad platform. 2019 marked the year when the relationship with that system ended as our two interlibrary loan departments migrated to Tipasa, OCLC's new cloud-based system. The platform change did not stem from dissatisfaction with ILLiad but from being informed that Tipasa would…

The University of North Dakota (UND) Libraries have developed a multi-award winning Customer Service Program (CSP) involving longitudinal assessment and continuous improvement. The CSP consists of iterative training modules; constant reinforcement of Customer Service Principles with multiple communication strategies and tools, and incentives that…

During the spring and fall semesters of 2016 and the spring semester of 2017, Kingsborough Community College, part of the City University of New York, launched an initiative to loan over 5,000 books for the entire semester to students in its Learning Communities and other special programs. This paper is a case study that describes the challenges…

Can a floating collection thrive in a large multicampus academic research library? Floating collections have been successful in public libraries for some time, but it is uncommon for academic libraries and unheard of for a large academic library system. This article will discuss the investigation into the feasibility of a floating collection at…

This article discusses a public service review and redesign that resulted in a blended service desk combining reference and circulation functions, staffed by nonlibrarians. The redesign implements a number of organizational structures that encourage service excellence, as found in the business literature and in examples of nonlibrary organizations…

This article describes the planning process and implementation of a single service point at Yale University's Sterling Memorial Library. While much recent scholarship on single service points (SSPs) has focused on the virtues or hazards of eliminating reference desks in libraries nationwide, this essay explores the ways in which single service…