Blatant Berry: Humans Do a Better Job
User satisfaction is the most important return on investment
John N. Berry III, Editor-at-Large -- Library Journal, 04/01/2006
Damn few machines do a job better than live humans. After I’ve spent a day fighting with my computer at the office, battling to penetrate the increasingly complex telephone menus to get to a live person, or filling in the blanks on some online form, my faith in automated systems and machines declines.
These days, managers score high when they cut staff, which they lovingly call “head count.” It is the name of the game in the library field, too. When you can’t actually reduce the number of bodies, sometimes you can cut the cost of those bodies. For example, you can push work down to lower-level staff, or you can replace expensive administrators with their own assistants. Some library administrators, like their corporate counterparts, believe they can get a better result by replacing head count with machines. All of these business methods of cutting costs and reducing staff are getting more and more popular in librarianship.
Several times last year, good librarians told me they planned to replace circulation staff with automated self-checkout machines. Most said that would allow them to reassign the “expensive” circulation clerks to more meaningful work with patrons. Others admitted that they could have the support staff do the reference work and retire expensive reference staff.
Years ago we learned that replacing staff with technology can be a trap. In the final analysis, when library managers calculate the return on investment for expensive self-operated circulation systems, they rarely include the full costs of both acquiring the systems and the often hidden costs of maintaining them.
One library I watch has had to hire a full-time person to oversee and repair constantly the complicated machinery it bought both to check books in and out and to distribute them automatically to the stacks. The downtime on that system is huge. Another library reported that only about 50 percent of its regular users are willing to check out their own books, so it has had to keep circulation staff around to take care of the people who still want direct service, who want a library worker to help them.
When you telephone a library these days you rarely get a live person. Most often you get a recorded menu that offers a litany of options, making you wait and listen to the whole list, and almost always the referral to a live person is the last choice offered. I often give up before the menu has been broadcast. Francine Fialkoff’s editorial “Retail Reference” (LJ 3/15/06) hints at the attempt either to turn reference service over to lower-paid staff or make it an online operation.
Of course, machines can do many jobs better than live humans. But in public service and public information enterprises, machines are rarely better at even routine jobs like reshelving books. When the rush is on, a live human can make decisions, set priorities, and decide on the spot what work needs to be done instantly and what can wait for the usual lull. A human can decide which questions demand more rigorous, careful searching in sources that are less accessible because of their format—particularly those in the nondigital formats—or their high cost.
Remember the importance of human contact to library users. That is the factor that separates the library from the department of motor vehicles or other government bureaucracies. The return on investment in machines and automated systems cannot always be measured in dollars. We must measure the satisfaction of users, too. There is a good reason why human workers are the most expensive part of a library budget.
