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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 55 | February 2002
Students Provide a Fresh View of Pictorial Workflows
The E Team-Year 11 students from
MacKillop College.
Photographer Louis Seselja
In December, five Year 11 students from Canberra's MacKillop College spent a week in the National Library's Pictorial Section. They analysed the process of supplying customers with photographic reproductions of the paintings, historic photographs and other items in the Pictorial Collection. The students had a particular brief to look at efficiency and at customer perceptions. With a fresh point of view, and a great deal of energy and enthusiasm, they produced an eye-opening 27 page report and many useful recommendations for improvement.
The students-Nathan Brewer, Clare Beens, David Ngu, Melanie Bowdern and Eric Shau -were part of the 'E Team' program organised by the Australian Quality Council. Under the program, students receive a day's training in process analysis and team skills and then spend a week in the workplace at a participating organisation. The organisation provides a facilitator, who helps the Team find information. The E Team's facilitator was Pictorial staff member Kirsten Bird.
Students who wish to take part in an E-Team volunteer through their school and spend six days of their holidays on their project. E-Team students are highly motivated and this was clearly reflected in the impressive team that worked on the Pictorial orders process. Pictorial staff were amazed at the speed with which the students came to grips with the complexities of the orders workflow.
The E Team interviewed 11 customers and found that there was a high rate of satisfaction with the photographic orders service. It was the E Team's view, however, that this level of satisfaction was surprising, given the hectic and complex activity that they had observed behind the scenes in the Pictorial and Imaging Services sections of the Library.
The Team's recommendations focused on improving the behind-the-scenes efficiency of the process. They noticed, for instance, that Pictorial staff were spending time photocopying multi-page order forms, and recommended that the order form be changed. As a consequence, the online order form has now been redesigned so that it prints as a single page, reducing the volume of photocopying.
An interesting recommendation, which reflected the student's high level of Internet literacy, was that the Pictorial catalogue records be made accessible to Internet search engines, so that a person using Google to search for portraits of James Cook, for instance, would be taken straight to the relevant Library catalogue records and any attached digital images. Such a step would create difficulties such as a greatly increased load on the web server but the Library will give further consideration to the issues involved.
The E Team also recommended that the Library create a database of copyright information for Pictorial items; a feasibility study for such a database commenced in mid-2001.
A number of other recommendations are presently being examined by the Pictorial Section.
This was the first occasion on which the Library has hosted an E Team.
It has been a very positive experience, and we can highly recommend it to
any organisation looking for a breath of fresh air, useful
recommendations, and the pleasure of meeting a wonderful team of young
people.
Linda Groom
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: dthomas@nla.gov.au