Empathy and Occupational Diversity - Guiding Forces for a Service Revolution at Kresge Library

Abstract

The Kresge Business Administration Library at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business has long been recognized for delivering exceptional service. Despite this success, there were many missed opportunities to serve and connect with the library’s community. With a new director in 2006, the library slowly embarked on a fundamental change in its service model. Instead of strictly looking at other peer academic business libraries, we evaluated new services on their merits and needs in the community. Two guiding forces here were empathy and occupational diversity. Through empathy, we better understood our users, making it easy to see the library from their perspective. Through occupational diversity (a term being used to describe a diversity of backgrounds among the librarians at the Kresge Library), we also began to evaluate new services from a non-academic approach. This allowed us to look well beyond academic librarian models to see effective approaches from the public and special libraries as well. This presentation will explore the transformation of the Kresge Library as grew and developed additional service aspects for the Ross School of Business Community.