 Yesterday I gave a perspective on what I see as sort of major challenges that we face as research libraries over the next decade or so. And today we're going to tell you, and I've brought some support along for this, what we're going to do about it at the British Library, or rather more specifically what we're going to do to enable us that the things that we do are the right things, as in the things that our users actually want and that add value to them. And so we're doing this as a trio. Fiona and Sally will join me in this talk. Yesterday I sort of spoke about the changing environment that we are in and the various challenges that we are facing. And from the perspective of the British Library, we have a sort of guiding vision that at least is intended to take us through these changes until 2023. So it's not quite yesterday's 11-year horizon. That's called living knowledge. And in particular it's some very bold aims that we want to achieve, including being the most open, creative and innovative institution of its kind in the world. No pressure there. And like many vision statements it's good and bold, but it doesn't explain in very much detail how we want to achieve some of those visions. So we've been busy over the last couple of years developing a new strategy, a new service strategy, for how we are meeting our purpose as a research library specifically. The library covers a range of purposes and in that sense it's quite different from other institutions. And this is interestingly sort of the first strategy of its type. And it's linked into work that's currently underway. Sally is leading on. It's about renewing our content strategy for contemporary content. And to enable us to take all these changes forward, we've set up a change management portfolio. It's helpful to call everything available. And this portfolio sort of brings together a range of activities that we've already started or that we're working on over the coming years to really transform the services that we offer to researchers and research organisations. And it builds on the service strategy. And when we set up the strategy it was roughly organised around three themes, which we've on a very high level oriented around a really simplified version of a researcher's workflow. And it is called find, use and share. So the idea behind it, find is that it sort of brings together activities where we help our users to find relevant information from our own collections, but also information globally. So this is at least a tentative shift with the view that some time ago, as a national library, in particular with large collections, you could sort of vaguely hope that for most people you can meet at least most of their needs somehow. That's clearly no longer the truth and hasn't been, I think, true for a while for collections. So we are looking really at how can we enable people to make more use of knowledge that lives outside of our collections and how we can connect this to what we have. The second part is then once you point to someone, to that material, how can you give them access to that information and enable them to work with the information? That for example just means that we want to go beyond the point where we say, you have a question, here 500 documents in some vague order of random preference, but rather how can we actually help you extract useful information and again sort of connect this to the information needs that you have. And the third element, SHARE, is arguably the one that's mostly focused at how we support other organisations. And that's the aim to work more on shared infrastructure and arguably sort of transform the way how we are working much more to, in some cases, an open sign service provider, because arguably as our needs to support people in accessing information goes down, there is at least for the foreseeable future an increase in helping to get information out and make sure there is persistent access, so this is us working with other institutions. And in terms of delivery, we sort of roughly group this around on-site and online services. I say roughly because there's obviously an overlap between the two of them, but we have under the everything available portfolio two relatively ambitious programmes, no underway, that look at potentially quite radically reconfiguring how we support users on-site and then similarly thinking about how can we sort of reinvent the way we make content available to our users online. And in order for us to deliver these two programmes, we really need to make sure that what we imagine will serve our users actually meets our users' needs. And that's why as part of these programmes, we set up a systematic programme to doing user research and we've created a dedicated post that's Fiona's role to sort of help co-ordinate these activities across the libraries. And Fiona and Sally will now tell you from the sort of on-site and online perspective how we are approaching this, what methods we are using, some of those might be of interest to you, and what we've learned in this process so far. Right. Well firstly, the reading room research, as you're probably aware, we've got a lot of reading rooms and over the last year or so we've been interviewing and observing people as well in our reading rooms over two phases. And the aim of this is to find out who's using us, why they're coming, what they think of us and how easy do they actually find it to use our material and our services. We've also been curious to see if there's a difference between the needs and experiences of people who want our general collections, that's things like humanity sciences, and if it differs from people who use our specialist collections and that's things like maps and manuscripts. And over this last year or so we've interviewed and observed 150 people. Now the difference is between these two types of potential users and users. Firstly, the general collections, the people using our general collections, we have a high proportion of students and also business researchers using them. Now we ask them for their pains and gains what they'd like from us. The particular pains these people are having is finding journals and they're also having problems with reading rules, things like pens only and opening hours. But there's a high proportion of general work environment approval, they do like it, but as I said they want us to be open longer and later and all days of the week. Now the special collections here, we've got a higher share of academic authors and senior academics. Now these people aren't always very happy but the things they're having problem with is finding special collection items and they're very vociferous about what they think about problems here. But they're also very vociferous with their approval of us and they particularly like the range of material we offer and the very fact that we've got this specialist material, this niche stock. In general, what's very comforting is people spontaneously will give you some really great feedback in spontaneous things like your own invaluable resource, your space of solace, and when people say it's worth even coming over from Canada, that was a real back slap or a thumbs up for us. Most people have tended to join within the last couple of years and the majority do come several times a week. Now this is an issue most of them live in London and the most popular age bracket is between 25 and 34. We also ask them about whether they use our material when they're actually in the reading rooms. Now 61% of them are using material on that day, but the remainder, half of them have used it in the past but they're not using it that day. And half of them have never used it before at all. So it does mean that nearly 40% of people are not using material on the day they're there. So this has given us a chance to look at whether we want to increase this. We certainly do and we're setting targets for how we actually increase usership on the day. Now the public areas is a different kettle of fish. You may be aware we've got quite a large public area in the building and it includes things like our cafe and we've monitored the number of people sitting in these areas with laptops and clearly working or doing some form of research. We've also interviewed 150 of them as well and we found that 61% of this space is being used by people for research or work purposes with particular peaks in the summer when it comes through to exams and the likes. So that means about 250 seats in the public areas each day is being used by people doing research and that's quite a lot adding on to people in our reading rooms, a significant boost. So we've been quitting these people as I said and we've found out that of these people in the public areas just over half of them are not readers. We've also found just under half are current readers or people who've not used us for a while and they have been readers but it does mean that these people who are not readers are not using our materials but they are using our space. So you wanted to find out more about them. Now why were these readers using the public areas and not the reading rooms? Well they were saying things like I need a cup of coffee, I've got to make a phone call, I've got to have a meeting with someone, things that they can't do in the reading rooms. Now the non-readers, they're mainly using it basically for a workspace. Over 80% of them said I need a work area to sit in and do work. The big issues we've got with these people who are not readers and using our public area, three in five of them don't know what's on offer. If they were a reader they have no idea what the benefits would be and they don't know how to become one either. We said to both groups, ok, what would you like, what improvements would you like? Well surprisingly or rather, not surprisingly, the readers out there for coffee, they want cheaper coffee. But the people who aren't readers, they want more space, more elbow room. All this work has also given us an opportunity to look into segmentation of all the people using it on site and we've found out, as you can see, the biggest audience by far are academics. And the academics are split roughly between the largest group of post-grads coming in at 44%, followed by the lecturers and professors group and followed by the undergraduates and below. When I say below, that's people who primarily are studying for A levels. Authors, they're split two-thirds of the authors and that's the second group down. Two-thirds of them are actually writing or researching for academic publications, whilst one-third are writing for commercial or public ones. And finally, with the bronze medal, so to speak, are the professionals. That's a very broad group we've found and that's everyone from things like government policy officers, to people working for charities, to people who are like journalists, or people who are just using the space as a kind of unofficial office. Now this is the point where I'm going to hand over to Sally. Thank you. Hello everyone. So it's fairly introduced to me already. I won't repeat it, but I'm Sally. And if I move forward, I shall reveal that I'm going to be talking to you about some research that we did starting last September and going through to the second week of January, so very hot off the press, with non-users. So, non-users. We had a particular aim at the British Library. As Fiona mentioned, actually three-quarters of our current customers who come to the London site at St Pancras, we do have a reading room in Boston Spa. So St Pancras isn't the only place we have a reading room. The users that come to us in London, actually three-quarters of them, live in London or the South East. But we are the national library. So our aim is to grow reach beyond that current user base and to be perhaps more relevant to people outside the M25. And that's why we want to do research with non-users. So, what do you think some of the methodological challenges might be in reaching non-users, a bit of audience participation? Anyone got any ideas? Do you want to shout them out? I'll defend them. Absolutely. Well done. Give that amount of coconut. Okay, so the very first thing to say is obviously when you're researching non-users, you don't know them and they know perhaps very little about you. So the first challenge that we had to accept was that the British Library on our own could not reach enough non-users to make this into a robust study. So we wrote a specification and did a competitive tendering process and appointed an agency who were able to reach the kind of numbers we were talking about in a quantitative survey and with whom we felt confident that we would actually get some quite robust results. We shortlisted five agencies, three came to pitch, two were quite convincing, but the one that we went with was a company called Accent and you'll see their logo appear later in the slides because I have in fact nicked some of the slides from their slide deck with their permission. Okay, so what were the advantages of using them? They were able to use a third-party online panel survey called Talluna. It's the second largest online panel survey in the UK after YouGov. It reaches five million adults who age 18 plus. So very wide representation, lots of good demographic mix which was part of what we were looking for. And as you can see from the blue blobs on the left-hand side of this slide, we did this research in two phases. The first phase went from September through to the end of October and that was the quantitative phase where we reached just over a thousand people through this online panel survey. It's actually a thousand and thirteen and the reason for that is because people were completing the panel survey so quickly that by the time we realised we got to a thousand they said stop, turn it off. Another thirteen people had completed the survey which was quite amazing stuff. It was very successful in terms of reach. The online panel survey took about fifteen minutes to complete. That's quite typical. Covered a range of questions about who these people were and what they were doing. All of them were doing some form of research. The second phase in the yellow, gosh that's awfully lime green, isn't it? The second phase was quantitative and this was a series of twenty-four telephone depth interviews where we conducted in-depth interviews, averaged about fifty minutes. Some of them went over, over an hour, where people had more to say but at least forty-five minutes per interview where we actually presented some stimulus material about our research services to the participants to see what they made of it. I'll tell you a little bit more about who these people are. The non-users for the QAMP survey, as I said, just over a thousand of them, we inverted what normally happens at the British Library so the majority were not in London and the South East. Seventy-four per cent were from the rest of the country, which is exactly what we wanted. We also had a very good spread, as you can see, of ages, socio-economic classes. Quite a lot of people with disabilities, actually, more than we expected and a good mix of people doing different types of research. Now at this point, those of you with particularly good eyesight will spot that the types of research cover everything from the usual academic traditional research through to business and personal research and they don't add up to a hundred per cent. This is because it was a multi-code question and what we found was there were far more people doing personal research, so for example family history, military history, something that was a personal passion on top of other work-based or academic research that they might be doing, which in itself was something we sort of thought might be the case, the first time we've actually done non-user research of this scale to find that. So why are they not using British Library services? Here we're not talking so much about the exhibitions. We're talking about people who either have never used the British Library's research services or haven't used them for the last two years or maybe came in for an exhibition or cup of coffee but never actually ventured into the 11 reading rooms at St Pancras or the one up in Yorkshire at Boston Spa. The main reason that I've highlighted in red here is they simply didn't know it existed. So of our four really big services, as you can see, even the online catalogue, they'd never come across that and there was actually very low levels of awareness of our website per se. The reading rooms again, a lot of people just haven't thought about using them. Into library loan, a lot of people didn't realise it existed and the ones who did the academics thought it was part of their university library service. So they didn't realise it had anything to do with the British Library. Business and IP Centre. This is a specific centre. In fact, there's a national network of almost 20 of them now throughout the country which provides advice and content and workshops for people who want to start or run their own businesses. Again, this was something where a lot of people simply didn't know it existed and the second main reason for non-use was because people had simply never considered it. Obviously that's related to the fact that it existed. So what do they want? Now, we use the term research facilities but this actually means like any on-site facility but I feel that is seen as a traditional library or a more open kind of hub, a more open kind of workspace where you don't necessarily go through a gate of area to use it because we have those kinds of spaces as well. So the main things that people were looking for were instant access to information, free Wi-Fi and the service itself being free of charge. So no real surprises there. But when we asked them in a subsequent question what were their most important things to them out of the things they'd already talked about? Quietness came up as being very high in their wish list. Now at this point they didn't know it was the British Library who'd commissioned the survey. So that was quite interesting because the perception and we did some more research to back this up actually of the British Library so it's a very hushed, worthy environment to use. But it's quite interesting that without prompting them with that kind of image in mind they also really needed somewhere quiet to get their work done. OK, so we'll probably be aware people these days tend to start their research online. It provides plenty of information at the touch of the bottom and basically people are very used to doing this from home. Google comes up top and beyond that trust came through as a very important factor. So the trust of the source itself and the material you can find in it. I think with all the fake news stories this is perhaps more upper mind most in people's minds these days. Offline comes later so people will go to physical libraries and institutions and again what they're looking here for is some very specific resources either some archival material or in fact the expertise and help of the librarians themselves. So libraries are still playing a key role and are continuing to do so in future. Two main things that people are looking for research support which is a posh way of saying help and the work environment again good quality quiet facilities where you can actually spread out your materials and study. However there are lots of barriers and for us the main one is basically the registration system that we have and requiring people to come in person to London or Boston spa with their proofs of identification I can get my teeth in to actually pick up their reader pass so that was a really big barrier for people as well as time, money, costs, travel the usual. So what we found in the qualitative part of the survey so that was a telephone depth interviews so that once people knew about this the services that we have to offer they were much more likely to use them in fact they got quite excited and wanted to start using the services straight away particularly things they can access from home and pricing for instance for documents supply didn't put them off which was a bit of a surprise to us we expected that to be more of a barrier than it was. Things that are going to be popular in future the online offering so digital collections stuff you can download and look at immediately without barriers the catalogs themselves so you can find the resources even if perhaps you access them from your local or university library rather than us. Main things that people want is obviously speed and ease of use and they want a simple streamline design so more Google like interfaces and again as I mentioned earlier coming to London to have to get the reader pass is still the biggest barrier we do need to keep that in place for the time being but we have got plans to expand with different tiers of membership in future which may mean that you can register online in future hooray! So to conclude here I'd emphasise the importance of the agency expertise I mean Fiona in particular but myself as well we've both been involved in various different social research studies over the years the agency accent were particularly good in this case and helped us to achieve the quota sample that we needed from the national survey we knew mixed methods that's something that's very common I know but we actually used some of the observation work that Fiona talked about earlier to provide some triangulation of the results as we went along we used segmentation what I haven't talked about so much in detail was the fact that we followed up the telephone depth interviews with three of the six clusters from the cluster analysis to identify patterns and behaviours that were similar and the three clusters we looked at were those where there was more potential for future use of British Library services another thing I'll mention in case you've not heard of it before is a thing called value proposition design which is a tool that you use to put the customer and a customer segment at the heart of everything that you plan to do for improving services in future so in future we'll make our registration systems easier easier to use but also easier in terms of getting hold of that all-important reader pass at the end of the journey not as much removing that barrier altogether you will still have to come in to get the reader pass in person but introducing new levels of membership going forward and introducing new online open services which Torsten referred to earlier under everything available