MISO (Measuring Information Services Outcomes) survey is a very popular survey that measures the performance of information services organizations. The then IS at Wellesley administered it in 2008. After I arrived in 2010, I made a decision to wait a little bit for the reorganizations and the repositioning of LTS to settle before we administered it again. We finally administered it in Feb 2015 to the campus faculty, students, and staff. All the faculty and staff, and a sample of Wellesley students (with balanced class participation) were invited to participate. The overall response rate for the faculty was 62% whereas for the students and staff it was over 50%. For some administrative offices, the response rate approached 90%. This is pretty impressive and therefore we can also rely on the results of the survey to measure the responses and respond appropriately.

The survey LTS administered in 2015 aimed to collect feedback on three areas: the importance of library and technology resources and services, satisfaction with those resources and services, and an assessment of how informed the faculty, students and staff are about LTS resources, services, and policies. Whereas we were very interested to know how well we are doing, the most important reason for the survey was to understand where we could be doing better. It is extremely hard to gather a coherent picture of this other than a survey with such a high response rate. You can read more about this here.

The overall message we learned from the survey is that LTS is providing a very high quality of service. It is clear that most of our community is not aware of some of the important services we provide and are not aware of many of the library and technology policies. There are also specific services that were identified where the satisfaction levels are relatively low.

Faculty members expressed highest dissatisfaction in two areas — classroom technology and Sakai. Students expressed their highest dissatisfaction with printing and wireless in the residence halls. The dissatisfaction expressed by the administrative staff did not have a similar coherence with the exception of not being consulted adequately regarding technology decisions that affect their work, reporting tools for data, and wireless access on campus.

These did not come as a surprise to us at all because we have been hearing about these already and have been working hard to help resolve them. As I had written before, our classroom technology support experienced a new low last Fall due to a variety of issues and I am sure that contributed a lot to the dissatisfaction. Our attempts to attend to this aggressively in Spring 2015 was widely appreciated by the faculty and we had relatively very few issues.

Similarly, the printing problems arose because of a few changes such as the installation of MFD (multifunction devices) as a part of the contract renewal by the College and the support from Papercut for these devices. We have been working very hard to resolve this, but when you have more than one vendor, it is hard to do so. Besides, it is hard to do anything when the semester is in session! Similarly, the wireless access in the dorms have been issues for some of the rooms that are in tricky locations for the signal to reach. We have been working with Cisco on their new access points that is meant for res halls.

In terms of staff sentiments, it is clear that we have a long way to go in communicating how decision making takes place. We have a group of administrative department heads who pretty much know and are consulted on all major decisions and so are the senior staff. Somehow this information is not clearly communicated to the staff, so we need to do a much better job.

Although not necessarily among the top areas of dissatisfaction for any one group, a number of resources and services were listed as items of concern at lower levels of dissatisfaction across multiple constituencies. These include access to on-campus resources from off-campus, access to on-campus resources via mobile devices, input into computing and library decisions that affect the community, Banner Self-Service, MyWellesley, and web conferencing.

These insights provide us how to structure our plans going forward to address these issues, so that the community feels that they expressed their concerns and that LTS heard them and are taking steps to resolve them. We are already on a path to do this!