Give us your views (maybe win a prize!)

Help us to map out the path ahead and continue improving.

The KLS team are always busy trying to improve our service to you. To guide this we need your feedback and suggestions. Positive or negative views are welcome - as are those of people making limited or no use of the KLS at present.

So how to help? Please complete our brief survey. With eight questions it should take only a few minutes to complete.

The eight questions even includes the one to provide your email address for a chance to win one of three £10 Amazon gift vouchers.

We will feed back on your input in Knowledge News and via this blog.

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Your feedback

Thanks for the over a hundred responses we received to our survey. Ten lucky winners should have received an email asking them to collect their prize.

Your comments are greatly valued to help guide how we develop the service. They also remind us of how things we think we have cracked can remain an issue.

The good news for us was that your satisfaction levels with the service remain steady and high.

Opening hours were raised as an issue. There seemed some confusion over our current hours (8:30am to 7pm Monday & Tuesday, 8:30am to 5pm Wednesday to Friday) with people unaware of the evening opening. The increased 24 hour provision, with the Knowledge Hub and Cyber Room both available, does seem to have improved matters somewhat. It is unlikely that we will be able to manage more staffed hours in the foreseeable future.

There was a slight fall in satisfaction around ejournals. We have greatly increased our selection of ejournals in recent years and are working to make access as convenient as possible.

You can see our full list of titles by logging in with your NHS Athens at MyJournals (NB if not logged in you only see a very partial picture). We have made many titles available without logging in when you are at work. This includes most of the BMJ publishing titles, those from the AMA, over 300 titles from Wiley Blackwell and a selection from Elsevier. We hope to add more over time. In some cases we have access to a journal via a supplier other than the main publisher – an example here is the Lancet which you can access via our A-Z list or via a search on our databases but you will not get via the publishers own site.

The rating for the book collection remains good. However there were still comments that we lack current editions. I think two main reasons can be identified for this. Firstly items may be on loan. The very latest books are those most in demand so a scan of the shelves should be supplemented by checking NewhamCat to see if someone else has the item you require. Secondly we might not have been told what you need. You can help us to help you by bringing in any reading lists you are issued, showing us interesting reviews or simply by suggesting titles. We nearly always buy recommended titles. We will be working with our suppliers in April to assess where we still have older editions and this should hopefully further improve the quality of books on the shelf. Do check out our new books lists that are on this blog and circulated in the monthly Knowledge News email.

The creation of the Knowledge Hub as a space for shared working does seem to have helped somewhat with noise levels. Library Staff have also been trying to avoid talking across the office but it is always likely that the Main Library will be more noisy than people would like. You can help by taking calls outside and using the Knowledge Hub if you need to discuss your work.

We got some brilliant responses to our question regarding the impact of information provided by the KLS. Here are just a few examples:

“the librarian helped me find a key reference paper which I later used for teaching students”

“Child with Y-- obtained information specific for children from UpToDate.”

“Access to case reports on Z helped formulate a plan for confirming diagnosis and managing drug interactions”

“I attended a recent teaching session on "Finding the Evidence: searching the health care database". It helped me a lot...”

We have emailed those who asked us for more detail of any aspect of the service and in response to specific questions and suggestions. If anyone feels they still need more information then please do get in touch (in person or via email). Thanks again for you input.

(C) Image Creative Commons - Jon Peck

Give us feedback (prizes to be won)

We need your help.

The KLS team are always busy trying to improve our service to you. To guide this we need your feedback and suggestions. Positive or negative views are welcome - as are those of people making limited or no use of the KLS at present.

So how to help? Please complete our brief survey. With eight questions it should take only a few minutes to complete.

The eight questions even includes the one to provide your email address for a chance to win one of ten 1GB USB memory sticks.
We will feed back on your input in Knowledge News.

(C) Image Creative Commons Luisvilla

Closing the loop

Most years the Knowledge & Library Service runs a user survey in November. On starting to prepare the latest version we realised we had not provided a promised update on what you said and what we were going to do about it. So here, with apologies for the delay, is some feedback.




The top three areas influenced by information from the KLS were advice to colleagues, teaching and confirming patient care.

70% of people reported learning something new and 60% shared that learning with colleagues.

The KLS scored high satisfaction scores with most aspects of service rated very good or good by 75% or more of respondents. The areas of lowest satisfaction were ebooks, ejournals and opening hours. We are working hard to improve ejournal availability and ease of access (watch this space). Opening hours will hopefully be an area of increased satisfaction in the new survey following the creation of the Knowledge Hub - greatly increasing the quality and quantity of 24 hour study space. eBooks are an area for further investigation. Experiments to date have seen poor uptake.

Lots of comments were received and these are particularly helpful. A recurring theme was the need for quiet working space. The Knowledge Hub has been designed as a noisier area and groups needing to work together are encouraged to use that space. Hopefully this will take some noise out of the main library. KLS staff are trying to be more quiet as we appreciate that we have an impact on noise levels. Many of the comments demonstrated a lack of awareness of what the KLS offers with people asking for things we already provide. To try and bridge this knowledge gap we have started a monthly news letter that is circulated to all registered users and via the Trust Information Bulletin. You can find back issues online.

(c) image creative commons - Brittany G

Knowledge Alerts - your views sought

The KLS runs a survey once a year on all aspects of the service we provide. We supplement this with occasional brief questionnaires that let us look a bit harder at one aspect.

Currently we are asking those who use our Knowledge Alerts service to provide us with extra feedback via this survey. There are 8 questions and it will take you only a couple of minutes to reply.

So give us the direct feedback we need - is this a service you value or a waste of time? Lets us know.

(C) Images Creative Commons - Jurvetson

The library is a growing organism...

1. Books are for use.
2. Every reader his or her book.
3. Every book its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. The Library is a growing organism.

The five laws of library science of S. R. Ranganathan

Recent visitors to the library will have noticed changes to the familiar location of sections of collection. Recent years have seen a healthy increase in the number of books we hold. These take up an increasing amount of space (despite regular clear outs of older material). Fortunately we have been able to make space for these by using shelves previously occupied by journals (increasingly an electronic only affair).

Suggestions for new books are always welcome and acted on where possible. To make it clearer for users how we select books to add or remove from the shelves a Collection Management Policy has been prepared. You can find the draft of this here. We welcome your comments on this policy.

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