Service 1 introduced an appointment system two years ago to manage visits to the public searchroom. On days when we definitely do not have any visitors booked in we do take the opportunity to work in other areas. There are still people who try to visit without an appointment, irritatingly some of these are regular users who seem to think that they are exempt from the system and we are having to be more firm in order to make the system work - after all we only ask them to give us a ring or give us time to respond to an e-mail request, which seems reasonable to me. 

From April we made it the rule that if we have not received and responded to any bookings for Monday evening (we used to be open until 7pm) by 4pm on the previous Friday the office will close completely at 5pm. We haven't had any problem with this but it at least means that in theory we still have two hours outside the normal 9-5 if people want/need to use it.

Service 2 manages an appointment system for consulting our materials.  We ask for 24 hours’ notice if possible, particularly for archives, but of course we always try to accommodate visitors if they turn up un-announced.   

As our reading room is not next to our offices, in term time we always ensure a member of staff is on the desk during opening hours which for us are 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. Monday – Friday, even if we do not receive bookings; they simply take some of their cataloguing or enquiry work with them to work on at the desk.

During the vacations, however, we operate an “open by appointment only” system, whereby the reading room is closed if we have no pro-booked appointments.  Our reading room is generally quieter in the long vacation anyway and most of our enquiries come from external researchers, so they tend to get in touch with us well in advance to make appointments.  Of course the downside is we may miss a person who turns up “on spec”, but we haven’t had any indication so far that readers have turned up when we are closed and we have been working this system for 5 years now.  It enables us to do essential work in our strong rooms that would be very difficult otherwise.

Service 3:  This is one of the dafter implications of working in a Library set up. In our own set up we argued that if the Library (or anyone else) wanted us to operate a come when you like system then it had to be staffed appropriately. We have 3.5 ftes who do just that, on a rota, and supported by archivists in the background where necessary. We worked out the cost of doing this in terms of fte cost, and we set this against the loss of specialist time (and therefore the work that the specialists can do - if we're in the search room we're not teaching, writing grant applications, enabling access to otherwise closed archives etc) through not having the searchroom team. The other problem we faced was reconciling working hours (37 per week) against the need to prepare materials before the searchroom opens and to put them away after it closes. We were pressed to have the searchroom open the full hours that the searchroom team worked but again we've managed to make the case for the unreasonableness and impracticality of this. 

I have to say that our researchers welcome the ability to drop in unannounced. That makes it much more difficult to plan than in an appointments only system, so counts as another cost, but in our situation it's one we're happy to bear.

Service 4 does not appoint an appointment system in our main searchroom (if nothing else, one has to be realistic with students), but we do in theory require it in our two other searchrooms. In practice we do have staff at those searchrooms as the searchroom is also the office space for staff and we do also need to manage/monitor those buildings and collections.

Service 5 doesn’t have the staff to cover long opening hours so we have a compromise:

- During Semester we have 'walk-in' access Mon-Fri 13.00-17.00 (09.00-13.00 by appointment only, and you can't hear knocking on the Reading Room door from our office so it really does have to be by appointment!)

- During Vacation 09.00-17.00 by appointment only.

We looked at our user stats recently (we record what times people arrive and leave) and they didn't justify opening earlier than 13.00.  Plus it is useful to have the mornings to be able to do work in the archive store and to accommodate classes and visits.

We have a rota for the semester afternoons which is predominantly covered by me (the Archivist) and my Archive Assistant in hour slots.  We also have a pool of 5 Library Assistants/Metadata Librarians who do an hour a week each.  This is historical from the time before there was an Archivist, and I had a little bit of a fight a year ago to keep them coming 1 hour a week (we had a restructure and there was some discontent). It is useful to have others in the Library who know how the place works, and can help when one of us is off sick or on leave, and it means that my Assistant and I aren't tied to the Reading Room the entire afternoon - there is some flexibility in the system.

Service 6 is a very small team, not based in the University library, so not a similar set up to [Leicester] apart from the fact that we are also “appointment only”  – but I don’t see why you would need anyone staffing the Reading Room (or being tied to your desk next door) if there are no readers in there and none expected?!   Surely that’s the whole point of the appointments system – so that you know when people are booked in and can manage your work (wherever it might take you in the building)  around the appointments.  I could understand a member of staff having to always be on duty if you had drop-ins, but not appointment only.

Service 7:  Our opening hours for researchers are currently 10am - 5pm, Monday to Thursday. We intend to reopen on Fridays again soon though. We have quite a small reading room so when we book in a researcher, we book them in for the entire day, regardless of whether they stay for six hours or ten minutes. We find this easier for ensuring that there are enough places and that there won't be an overlap.

We also try to accommodate walk-ins as much as possible if there is space. We advertise an appointment-only system but I'm sure you know how little some people pay attention to things like that!

We use a rota system for supervising researchers. Each archivist will do a full day or two a week supervising the reading room, answering user requests through email, over the phone, etc. A second archivist will then come in to provide relief for an hour for lunch but there will only be one archivist on the reading room at any one time. 

This frees up other staff members to carry out cataloguing and other duties elsewhere.

Apologies if this is completely unhelpful, we can sometimes feel short-staffed with three full-time archivists so I can only imagine how difficult it must be in Leicester. 

If the reading room is completely dominating your work schedule, would it be feasible for you to close the reading room for one day each week or do library opening hours completely dictate your own?

Service 8 doesn’t publicise opening hours, instead we ask people to “arrange a visit”. This is because as a normally (except for project staff) single archivist in a business archive I have to be flexible in my availability for meetings and respond to [organisational] needs. So researchers actually have more flexibility too – they can come in at a mutually agreeable time, sometimes this is weekends if I’m free, or evenings if appropriate.

We have two systems at Service 9.

1. For all external researchers, visits are by appointment only, Monday – Friday, between 10-12:30 and 1:30-5pm.  (Archive Services is usually staffed from 8:30-5:30 Mon-Fri). We ask for as much notice as possible, usually at least a week in advance, to ensure the reading room is available and to give us time to get the requested records ready for the visit.

2. For all staff and students we operate a drop-in system.  Individuals can drop in between the same hours advertised for external researchers, but they do not need to book in advance.  We regularly post any expected changes to our opening hours (due to reading room closure for a meeting/training session, or staff commitments elsewhere etc.) on our website so students and staff can check first to see if staff are likely to be available.

Our reading room sits five researchers and is adjacent to the Archive Services office with a large glass partition separating the two so we are able to invigilate from our desks. This means that Archive staff do not take up vital space in the reading room, and we are able to continue with other activities at our desks. We are fortunate in that there are now 4 permanent staff in Archive Services so, although at the moment we are quite short-staffed due to the summer holidays and my being away on research leave, normally there is always at least one member of staff available during our opening hours; and usually there is more than one to enable the other to work in the strong-rooms etc.

On occasion we will extend the opening hours, e.g. for researchers who cannot easily come during normal working hours, e.g. part-time PhD students, but this is rare and always by prior agreement. Our building is not open 24/7 unlike some of the other university library sites, and opening hours are reduced during vacation periods, so we’re fortunate that there is no real pressure on us to open for more extended hours.

We did reconsider the booking system a couple of years ago as it dates from when there was just one member of staff – the University Archivist – when all visits (internal and external) had to be by appointment. We decided to retain the booking system for externals because although we’re better staffed now, we’re actually busier than ever with commitments involving meetings or working elsewhere in the university and outside, particularly with groups of our own students. We’ve been running the drop-in service for staff and students for two full academic years now and it has proved very popular.  We did retain the lunch-hour break as otherwise it can be quite difficult to ensure everyone gets a lunch hour – especially with researchers who tend to want to work straight through as their time with us is limited.

So having the two systems in parallel is our compromise in extending hours without over-committing ourselves to manning the reading room/office.  It works well for us.