The Challenge
University of Hertfordshire has two vibrant and welcoming Learning Resource Centres, which are the beating heart of their urban campus in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, UK. Their academic and research collections are digital-first and complemented by a growing collection of fiction and well-being print titles.
With 35,000 students from over 110 countries, and more than 700 career-focused degree options, University of Hertfordshire chose Lean Library to ensure that their students and researchers can easily access the wealth of resources available to them.
What challenges was your library facing before using Lean Library?
“Traditionally we’ve always encouraged students to go directly to the online library to search. However, there’s been a definite shift where students aren’t doing that as much anymore. There are additional tools available now that they can use, and no matter how often we said, “Start here,” they would still choose their own methods.
We noticed a trend, and I don’t think it’s unique to our institution, where the use of library electronic resources was declining. I suspected this wasn’t because students weren’t using content, but rather because some of it was Open Access, meaning they no longer needed to go through the online library to access it. However, when they needed something that wasn’t Open Access, the question became: how were they finding it?
It became about bringing the library to where the user was, facilitating their processes. It became about “let’s make this as easy for them as possible”.
It sounds like bringing the library to patrons was what you were hoping to achieve with Lean Library?
“I guess it was also about raising brand awareness: “We are paying for these resources, this is your library, this is us helping you. We need to make sure that you understand we’re facilitating this process.” The fact that we could colour-code the extension to link to our existing branding—all of those things are really helpful, because it is the library paying for these subscriptions. Each time it pops up, it’s communicating that message to the end user that this is us doing our job—you might not be on campus; you could be anywhere in the world, but this is still us doing our job.
One more thing, it’s also about risk management. There’s the risk if you don’t provide easy routes to access things legally, then potentially people may decide to do things via routes that increase risk to the institution—things that open you up to a cybersecurity risk. It was also part of a risk management strategy: let’s make this as easy as possible so they don’t try and do something that opens their own device to risk or an institutional device to risk.”
University of Hertfordshire have used Lean Library Assist messages to communicate personalized messages to patrons via the Lean Library browser extension when they visit specific websites. The below Assist message lets patrons know they have access to a particular site via their library. This means that University of Hertfordshire’s library branding is displayed in patron’s workflows, marketing the library and increasing awareness with students.
The Solution
What made Lean Library stand out to you as part of the solution to the challenges we’ve discussed?
“We compared tools, and I advocated strongly for Lean Library. One, it was the branding element—let’s sell ourselves as having this. The second thing is that it builds into other features should we wish to get Lean Library Futures. My thought was if we got this then we could build on it later, if we can demonstrate that there’s a need and it’s working.”
You have fantastic usage results with almost 4,500 engaged users in one month—that’s an increase of over 2,000%. How have you promoted Lean Library to students, and what advice would you give to an institution picking up Lean Library for the first time?
“It’s a multifaceted way of spreading the word. One of the things I think we managed really well was making it easy for people to send out comms—we wrote the copy for them and said “Here you go, this is what Lean Library’s about!” We had emails directly to academics, and added a prompt to download Lean Library to the virtual learning environment that we could then add to any research module, library learning module, or programme page.
At the start of the academic year, we always update the programme page with a welcome from the library team, but now they also have a ‘Download Lean Library’ feature as well. That’s on every single programme in the institution, just to raise awareness.
We talked to our library and computing services staff, making sure every single member of staff would know what Lean Library is when someone comes to talk to them. They could also start downloading it themselves.
We wanted to show that if we gave this to students on a specific programme, we would see a direct link to interlibrary loans. Due of privacy restrictions however, we can’t see too much data. Working with IT colleagues we could show an increase in interlibrary loans from Lean Library during our pilot phase. This helped to demonstrate the value of Lean Library to our colleagues.”
“We asked the academic engagement team: “If you’re teaching, please mention it. Here’s a slide with a video, etc.” We tried to make it as easy for people as possible. We also started to promote it through our direct comms with researchers and added it to their pages on our institutional intranet. This is where researchers go, rather than students.
We also promoted Lean Library at staff-facing events—amazingly, one researcher came back to me and said, “This is making my grant writing so much easier!” I could then put that into all my comms, and she said I could use her name, so that was helpful. That really got buy-in because it was somebody recognisable saying, “this is amazing.”
Then there’s stuff that went out in the all-staff comms. Anything that mentioned research, we would get Lean Library mentioned. It was constantly repeating the message, putting it in lots of places for different members of our student and staff community.”
University of Hertfordshire had on average 4,673 engaged users in November 2024 (pictured on the bar chart below). Back in August 2024, they had an average of 206 engaged users. This shows an increase of over 2,000% from August to November, after a period of heavy Lean Library promotion by University of Hertfordshire.
The Results
Have you seen a difference in the way your patrons interact with library collections and services since implementing and rolling out Lean Library?
“We’ve become a bit obsessed with looking at data! We have a dashboard that draws lots of data about interlibrary loans, and we could see that since the start of term our interlibrary loans have gone up 48%. Now not all of those are from Lean Library, but we could see that roughly 19% of our interlibrary loans were coming from Lean Library via an auto-populate route, which represents the highest proportion of all the different routes through which they could have requested an interlibrary loan. That was a really good thing to be able to say, “Hey, this is working!”
We’ve also been looking to see how many searches in PubMed are happening because it’s a free database and we encourage students to use it, and we teach them how to use it. I like to see after I’ve taught a session on PubMed that the number of Lean Library searches goes up. You can definitely see an increase when someone has introduced Lean Library at a session, and so you can see the message is definitely getting through.”
The Impact
In 2024, University of Hertfordshire library connected students to resources almost 9,000 times via Lean Library via the below routes:
This has saved their patrons just over 2,700 hours in 2024, making accessing the research they need an easier and quicker process. Just over 900 of those hours were from October and November 2024 after heavy promotion efforts for Lean Library from University of Hertfordshire.
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