Enabling access to digitised, copyright cleared texts on module reading lists is a highly valued service to students and academic staff. However it appears that there is very little ability to measure the effectiveness of this service or to identify a benchmark in order to understand whether a good service is being provided to customers. This project was set up to address this by aiming to understand the digitisation service in different institutions, establish robust measurements and a realistic initial benchmark.
Thirteen institutions took part in the year-long project. The recorded activity included collecting data for all new and renewal digitisation requests and the average time it took to make the item available online. This was done across four sample weeks within the academic year.
This data has identified the peaks in service across all the institutions and established an average turnaround time of 7.6 days which can be used to benchmark our services; something we did not have before this project.
In addition, the recorded activity has resulted in several immediate impacts for a number of the institutions. These include:
• upskilling staff to deal with peaks or bring the scanning in-house;
• employing temporary staff to deal with backlogs;
• investing in new scanning equipment;
• researching potential software solutions and in one case the purchase of a software package.
For all institutions the project has enabled them to really focus on their service in order to identify where improvements can be made which ultimately benefit the customers.
The future is a little harder to determine, particularly with the ever-changing digital information landscape. However, the project has created a community of digitisation service professionals who are now connected and have shared their knowledge and their experience to increase their own understanding of digitisation in their own and academic institutions
