CIPFA - Performance in Public Services: Social Research

Children's Plus

The Children's Public Library Users Survey (Children's PLUS) is a national model for surveying child and teenage visitors to public libraries.  The questionnaire focuses on various aspects of the library service, for example book and computer usage and general attitudes to these resources and to the library overall.  The survey also asks children and young people for their age and gender and who they came with, as these can provide useful information about the profile of visitors using the library. Children's PLUS proposes a uniform methodology where questions are asked in the same order to achieve consistency for valid national, regional and local comparisons.  The importance of the survey is that it has been designed to be used as a service improvement tool, rather than as merely a measurement or a 'number crunching' tool.

Of what use is a user survey to a public library service?  The answer to this becomes obvious when you think about what your library management system tells you and, more significantly, what it does not tell you.  It is essential that library users are given the opportunity to tell you what they think of the service, rather than you merely being able to record how many items they borrowed.  Elected members are generally more receptive to users' opinions, rather than the endless stream of statistics with which they are normally bombarded.  The Children's PLUS enables you to build improvements into the service, improvements which have arisen from users providing their opinions of the service.  Your service can, as a result, become more customer-focused and more receptive to complaints or compliments.