The National Art Library is seeking your input to our latest user survey! As a library where anybody and everybody can come in and use us, it can prove difficult to know who our patrons are and what they think about our services, facilities and collections. This information and feedback helps us to gauge what we are doing well and what we need to improve on. It also helps us to plan better, so it is essential that we find ways to find out more about you and your experience.
There are, of course, already lots of ways that we can find out more about our users and their activities. However they have limitations which we hope the survey will overcome. Firstly, there’s the information held on our patron database which lets us know the number and geographical spread of our users, but it doesn’t give us a sense of why they joined and who they are. Secondly, as the majority of our books have to be ordered up from our library stores, we can keep track of what is most frequently requested, but again – did our users find everything they wanted or did the request satisfy their research need? Thirdly our online enquiry service lets us know about what some of our users are researching and wanting copies of, but this is only a segment and we would also like to know their views on using the service remotely. Finally, as we all work in the reading rooms, we do often talk with our users, but with limited time (on both sides!) we can only get a partial and anecdotal view.
One area where we have no ongoing way of capturing your views is the accessibility of the Library and the physical experience of using it – how easy it is to reach us, how do you find the temperature, noise and light levels and have you experienced any barriers to use? The survey has a particular emphasis on these aspects of using the Library.
We emailed the survey to our registered patrons in mid November and have already received hundreds of responses containing incredibly rich and useful feedback. We also welcome the views of those who are planning to come to the Library but haven’t registered for a Library account yet, and of those people who use our services entirely online.
We would love it if you could add your voice to the response. If you would like to fill out the survey, you can do so here. Please complete it by 31 December 2025.
Once the survey has closed I will write again about the findings and what we will be doing as a result of what you have told us matters to you.
A excellent blog post definitely need more posts like this explaining the history of the library to visitors. Maybe more leaflets of the library itself to be created for the visitors so that they can find the library itself? As a regular visitor and librarian from the British Museum it’s always a joy to visit the library. Hopefully there will be more posts . Well written :)