Here at BU library, we rely on students' feedback and comments to help us improve. We're committed to giving students every opportunity throughout the year to feed back on library facilities and resources, so we can shape our future services to suit them.
We use SUBU's SimOn as our main online feedback mechanism. This is a simple way for course reps to gather collective feedback from their cohorts, and also for individual students to make their comments heard. This year we've received 80 pieces of feedback about the library through SimOn, and because these are generally supplied with a name and contact details we are able to respond directly to the person concerned.
Focus groups give us a great opportunity to explore topics in depth with students from a range of courses, faculties, and levels of study. This year we ran a total of six separate groups - more than twice as many as the previous year. The theme for this year was IT in the library, and this was a great help in deciding the type and number of computers to buy. Many students in these groups said they would prefer to use a monitor with their own device, so we took the decision to buy 60 standalone screens - including some larger 34" monitors, again as a result of comments in the focus groups.
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We love getting out and about on campus so we can talk to students. At the start of the academic year we included a quick one-minute survey on our pop-up stands to find out new students' attitudes to learning and academic skills. This provided valuable information for planning and delivering workshops and other content for the new cohort.
This year we've had a team of student ambassadors interviewing other students to ask about their experience of the library. They told us about their favourite study places, what works well for them and what we could be doing better. Uploading these videos to social media was a great way for new students to hear first hand from their peers what they thought of the library.
We never miss an opportunity to elicit feedback, so at Christmas we had the 'tree of dreams' where students could hang their library wishes, and we ran similar events for Halloween and Valentine's Day too. The feedback we get tends to be anonymous, but it's still really useful for spotting general trends. This has prompted us to introduce initiatives like providing blankets for cold weather periods, and we're currently considering food and drink provision in the library in response to comments received this year.
We received 390 separate pieces of customer feedback this year - of which over 90% were positive
The library NSS score for 24/25 was 88.6%. We continue to perform well as we work towards our goal of exceeding the sector benchmark
“I find the library environment a really good space to work in. It's clean, peaceful and has a great range of resources.”
BSc (Hons) Adult Nursing
We regularly post feedback from library users on our Instagram account - take a look here