Access services teams are under increasing pressure to adapt—while navigating staffing constraints, evolving student behavior, and legacy service structures. Often redesign efforts begin with solutions rather than shared understanding.
This session shares a phased service design assessment underway at a mid-sized academic library. The work began by establishing psychological safety and shared goals across departments (Phase 1) and is currently in Phase 2: Discovery, using low-barrier methods to examine both user behavior and internal workflows. The goal is to build a shared evidence base before making structural changes. The project will move into its final design and pilot phase in late spring and summer, and by the time of this conference, outcomes and lessons learned will be available to share.
Discovery methods include lobby whiteboard prompts, social media polling, research help exit questions, transaction analysis, space-use counts, faculty listening sessions, and structured staff insight conversations. Rather than focusing on performance evaluation or quick fixes, this process surfaces patterns of friction, hidden labor, and misalignment between student behavior, staffing capacity, space design, and decision-making structures.
Participants will learn how to implement practical, low-cost discovery tools in access environments; distinguish between collecting data and generating meaningful insight; and frame structural tensions in ways that support collaborative, evidence-informed redesign.
The session includes a guided small-group exercise in which attendees draft an insight statement based on a persistent challenge from their own institution.
