Hartford HealthCare
“LibLynx redefines resource access – we’re empowered, we’re personalized, and we’re mobile. Best of all, patrons love it!”
Lisa Carter, Director of Health Science Libraries
The Challenge
Deliver more, with a lot less
70% staff cuts
A corporate directive to do more with less had reduced the library staff from 21 to 6 over a 2 year period. Maintaining monolithic library portals for each location, as well as site-specific licensing arrangements, soaked up administrative time and effort. This made it increasingly difficult to deliver effective services across multiple locations, especially as some no longer benefited from having an on-site librarian or library.
Greater demand and complexity
The high level of library support and service that Hartford’s clinicians had come to expect needed to be maintained. But growth in the range and volume of resources available had also made it harder for patrons to find resources most relevant to their needs. The library was stuck between relying on discovery tools that didn’t encompass all relevant materials, and sending patrons to review increasingly long lists of resources. For example, resource target URLs dropped patrons into generic landing pages, rather than directly to relevant resources.
Poor mobile experience
The poor access experience on mobile devices led patrons to bypass the library portal in favor of dedicated publisher apps, skewing the library’s understanding of patron usage. Worse, some apps required patron purchase to access content that the library had already paid for.
Inadequate reporting
Analysis required manually compiling statistics from all locations, so basic questions, such as whether usage represented low use by many or heavy use by the few, could not be easily answered.
How We Helped
Access customized for patron needs
Lower costs
High automation means significantly reduced ongoing administration and maintenance. The library no longer needs to maintain separate intranet and internet web portals, or location specific library portals, and Lisa and her colleagues can concentrate on research and instruction. Managing access down to the patron level also enables Hartford to save a substantial amount of money on subscription costs by licensing resources just for the users that need them, rather than for everyone at every location.
Eliminated reliance on IT
The library can quickly reconfigure their portal for the changing needs of their patrons, without reliance on IT for technical support. Publisher-specific outages, new resources and library events can be promoted directly to relevant patron groups or locations via custom messaging and emailing.
Improved service delivery
Curated resource panels targeted at specific patron groups allow the library to support a wider range of information seeking behaviors. With over 17 curated specialty topics covered, Lisa and her staff can easily direct patrons to resources tailored to their needs, and encourage exploration of new resources often ignored by users with fixed favorites, or excluded by the library’s discovery tools. Patrons can further customize the layout of their library portal to focus on the resources that matter most to them.
Insight into user behavior
Our reporting tools make it easy for Lisa and her colleagues to understand usage patterns within patron roles, departments and even locations, enabling more informed purchase decisions and outreach efforts.
A great mobile experience
Hartford’s new mobile-ready portal allows patrons to dispense with their dedicated publisher apps and access all resources via the library portal – saving them time and money, reinforcing the value delivered by the library, and minimizing login fatigue.
Valuable instructional & outreach tools
Instructional and outreach tools greatly simplify remote support and patron education, empowering users to take greater control of their library experience and find the resources they need faster. This functionality was particularly important to Lisa, as it enabled her to maintain a focus on outreach despite the severe staffing cuts.
Hartford HealthCare is Connecticut’s most comprehensive health care network with over 4,100 physicians, residents, fellows, research scientists, and students from colleges and universities throughout the state and Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
Their flagship facility, Hartford Hospital, is one of the largest teaching hospitals and tertiary care centers in New England. Other facilities include an acute-care community teaching hospital, an acute-care hospital and trauma center, two community hospitals, and a large multispecialty physician group. The Hartford HealthCare Cancer Institute provides coordinated care across five cancer centers, and is the charter member of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Alliance.
Health Science Libraries
Hartford’s Health Science Libraries are both academic and special libraries, serving patrons at 14 locations throughout Connecticut with four physical libraries and 10 virtual libraries.
In addition to supporting clinicians with research and instruction, the libraries provide the Continuing Medical Education departments at four hospitals with research support, and review 3,000+ news feeds weekly in order to curate a custom news feed for patrons.
Please contact us to explore how we can help provide your users with a one-stop service for all resources.