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My first appointment was not until 11:00 so I spent the morning catching up on email. Then I met my former colleague from Wayne State, Bob Holley, for an early lunch. Bob and I were both at Wayne for many years and held a variety of positions. At one point, he was Interim Dean and I was Interim Associate Dean. He also served as the only librarian on my doctoral dissertation commitee. We chatted about old times and new times and agreed to meet again in DC for Annual.

Then I spent the entire afternoon in a LibQUAL results session. Surprisingly, this turned out to be the most valuable experience of the entire conference. I’ve been doing LibQUAL since 2001 and sometimes moan about it but today’s session on what to do with the results helped me focus on several factors that I hadn’t paid much attention to previously. Most often, we want to know “how we did,” often in comparison with others. That is the information we presented at the staff meeting and to the Library Advisory Committee. But one extremely important component is the importance that our various constituencies (faculty, undergraduates and graduate students) place on the various factors they want from the library. They may be different rankings from each other and they may be different than what we, as staff, think our users want. What is important to remember as we go about the final stages of prioritizing our strategic planning initiatives is that we should focus on improving the areas that are important to users that we don’t do as well as they would like. It would not make sense to spend a lot of time and money on areas that we do well already that are not that important to our users. More on this later.

Bill and I went to dinner with his colleague Jack Walsdorf, who lectured at ZSR last year in the Booklovers Road Show and then Bill had to fly to California to meet with Alibris brass tomorrow. In the morning, I will send one final entry, summing up the Midwinter experience.