How Librarians Helped to Design ICA

PC Reservation® was born as a queue-based product. There were some great features that included pagers for notification and some great graphical displays. But the unveiling of a prototype at Midwinter ALA in 1999 helped us to discover the many flaws with a queue.

First it's important to understand why we first think of using a queue. If you had a manual system for PC management, then you used a clipboard or similar low tech approach to manage a list or queue. Your borrowers would sign up and then wait to be called. If a user left and later returned, smaller libraries might remember the face and make adjustments. Of course others that arrived later would need justification for a suddent shift in the list. We tend to think of automation in the context of a manual process. Twenty years ago, we designed ILS systems with a subject, title, and author search, just like our catalog cards in the drawers. But with today's technology, a limited approach like this would forego key word search, book jackets and reviews, and a host of other OPAC enhancements that have become commonplace and expected. But librarians probably didn't say, add a keyword search, or link a jpeg image of the cover, they said, "we need to use the same concepts when searching the catalog that Internet users utilize to find information on the Internet."

So when we unveiled that first beta, proud creators of an innovative approach to a queue, we made the mistake of asking libraries what they REALLY wanted. Within two days we realized that everything we had written was a waste, and our prospective customers had 'designed' an entirely different approach. (That wasn't a mistake by today's standards, after all, more libraries use PC Reservation than all competitive solutions combined.)

As users came to us in those early PC management days, they explained the drawbacks of their manual system:

• Idle borrowers must wait around in chairs or stand near the desk until a computer is ready
• While waiting, users tend to be noisy and often look over user's shoulders in an attempt to stay busy
• People continually come back to the desk to ask how long before their turn.
• Every time we estimate the wait time, and the next user goes outside to get a cup of coffee, the PC user ends his or her session early, and I must call the next person on the list because the REAL next person stepped away. Boy, do I hear grief when he or she returns, because I gave away his or her computer.
• Not every computer user that comes to our library wants to use a PC for 60 minutes. Some people just want to check email, but we can't possibly manage that kind of randomness.
• Our computer utilization isn't as high as we would like, because there is a lot of wasted time associated with finding the next person, shuffling priorities, and helping people understand the erratic behavior of our manual system.
• Our staff spends most of the day managing computers instead of helping people explore our resources,
• We have fights frequently, as people argue about who is really next, or why someone used more than an hour when our policy is one hour, or why going to the bathroom should cause me to lose my turn and wait another 20 minutes for the next computer.
• This list goes on and on, but what you see here is not as much a limitation of a manual system, as it is the inherent flaws of a queue (which is what a manual system really is.)

To continue the story, click on "What Others Did to Mitigate Queue Problems" or "How EnvisionWare Customers Defined the Ultimate Solution"