Over the last two years, the reader development organisation, Opening the Book, has been providing consultancy and training to give public libraries a new range of techniques to understand better who is coming into libraries and how they are using library spaces.

This work is based on the approach of Paco Underhill, author of the seminal Why We Buy: the science of shopping (Orion 1999), and uses observation techniques from retail market research adapted for a library environment.

Observing how borrowers behave gives more objective and inclusive information than relying on self-selected or staff-originated customer feedback.  Staff can observe individual borrowers to see where they go, what they look at or pick up, who they speak to.  Or a particular area can be observed to see how all the people who come into that area behave . 

Warrington Libraries recently undertook a week-long observation in two libraries resulting in more than 200 observations of individual users.  The average length of visit was nine minutes and 43% of people borrowed a book.  57% were therefore visiting a library for an average of nine minutes but not borrowing a book.

What observations are showing is that many people are still making time to visit the library but they have less time when they get there than they used to.  People are coming in but do not find what they want to borrow in the short space of time they have.

The answer to this must be to offer a better service to the five-minute borrowers, the people who want to drop in and out and find something quickly.

(extract from Getting Past 'G', Rachel Van Riel, Update, 15 August 2002)