Graduate Students: Your Feedback Helps Libraries Adjust Services Amid Pandemic’s Impact

February 18, 2021

As we all navigate the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, we continue to make adjustments and adapt, including at the UW-Madison Libraries. Throughout the last year, we’ve developed solutions to ease the burden of the pandemic on our community’s academic endeavors. Thanks to an extensive survey conducted by the Graduate School, we better understand how this situation impacts the campus community. More specifically, we learned what graduate students are saying about what worked and what didn’t–allowing us to address the issues raised and uncover opportunities for more communication. Recognizing the importance of supporting our graduate student community, we appreciate the time dedicated to this survey.

While providing services remotely is not entirely new to the Libraries, adapting to a user community that moved quickly to a near-fully remote learning scenario a year ago created many new challenges. After assisting campus with a massive lift to transition courses online in just 12 days, the Libraries turned our attention to continuing to provide access to our collections – whether digitally or in-person, while also expanding our support in the virtual environment through chat services and one-on-one consultations with faculty, students, and staff. Additionally, the Libraries provided access to laptops for loan, ensuring our faculty, students, and staff had the technology they needed to complete their work.

Our ILL service created unmatched access by digitizing materials that were previously only in print. Through our partnership with HathiTrust, more of our collections were available digitally than ever before through emergency access. As the semester ended in the spring, the Libraries were already planning to allow for access to physical materials and launched the Pickup by Appointment service, followed shortly after by the onsite building access through Library by Appointment which was made available to faculty, staff, and graduate students first. Your responses to the Graduate Student survey reflected on needs for improved turnaround times, increased space for graduate students to work, extended due dates, and more electronic materials.

Based on your feedback, the Libraries are now considering how we can continue the Pick Up by Appointment service post-covid, which was the most requested service in the open-ended questions. The Libraries is also addressing other specific requests made in the survey, such as book renewal challenges. We have also recently expanded our appointment service to allow for more than one appointment per day, to mention just a few ways we have used your feedback.

While the survey itself has been extremely valuable to us, the Libraries continue to seek and utilize your feedback. Your input helps us create a service profile that benefits our entire campus community – to which we are wholeheartedly committed. If you have anything else you’d like to share with us, please reach out through Ask a Librarian.