Bakker's Blog

Buyers and sellers : students and faculty

  The HBR post on "How do you value a "free" customer?" got me thinking about where AHSLs put their marketing and outreach efforts. The article discusses the importance of the often neglected customer-customer relationship, such as the relationship between buyers and sellers at auctions - Ebay makes no money from buyers, but they are essential to the success of the company.   In libraries, do we have similar buyers and sellers - are students our buyers and faculty our sellers?  Who do we and who should  we market to?

While I was at Georgetown,  the education services team wanted to focus our limited time and resources (and what library isn't limited)  where they would  have the most impact - so in addition to our direct contact with students throughout the curriculum, we sought ways to foster better information practices among the faculty. The reasoning was that students would be more likely to develop good life-long information seeking behavior if they are surrounded by faculty constantly using good practices throughout their work;  and developing one faculty member with great information practices has the potential to significantly impact multiple students' information practices and create better life-long information use.   

In libraries, is there an equality of ROI between our buyers and sellers? Can we target certain groups for certain projects and maximize our effectiveness?

Another Reason to Worry About Sleep Deprived Doctors

New Scientist.com reported on a recent study showing that lack of sleep impacts people's moral judgement. 
Two interesting findings:

"While participants did not become less “moral” when sleep deprived, they did require two seconds longer on average to answer complex moral questions, Killgore says. However, questions without a moral component did not take longer to answer after participants were kept awake."  And...

"Sleep deprived participants also showed slight shifts in what they deemed appropriate actions compared to when they were well-rested. The changes were more pronounced in individuals who scored lower in  'emotional intelligence' tests."

Certainly facts worth considering when thinking about hours on call and training during residency.