Park City Library has a three-year strategic plan that focuses on user experience, inclusivity, community relationships, and lifelong learning. The Library has defined the user experience goals as developing and maintaining an efficient, welcoming, and dynamic library staff, facility, and resources. This blog post summarizes the Library’s work for the 2023 user experience goal of evaluating service hours. The Library’s next goal is to perform a 10-year facility analysis (2024 goal).
New Library Hours
New hours begin after the holidays, on Tuesday, January 3rd. The Library will now open at 9 am Monday thru Saturday.
Monday – Thursday 9am-8pm
Friday & Saturday 9am-5 pm
Sunday 1-5pm
The shift in hours is based on the research compiled below. The library is currently open 64 hours per week. Library staff is committed to maintaining the same number of hours for the Park City community.
Defining User Experience
User experience is a newer term that focuses on the need for businesses and institutions to be ever-evolving and improving to continuously meet the needs of their users. It became apparent that shifting service hours would ultimately improve user experience by being open when there is the greatest need. Throughout the past year, library staff has gone through many stages of research to evaluate the current service hours and create a recommendation to shift the hours to times that the library is more frequently used.
Research and Evaluation
Library staff compared our hours to those of other resort town libraries and libraries close to ours. Door count statistics were pulled to see how many people visited the Library at specific hours of the day throughout the year. Room rental statistics were taken into consideration to determine if the adjustment would lead to more rental use.
Lucky Ones Coffee sales, library statistics and observations, and input from programming staff are some of the other data sets used in this evaluation.
In addition, the Library recently installed a “quiet use” booth in the stairwell close to Lucky Ones on the first floor. This amenity receives a great deal of use because there are no other quiet areas before 10:00am.
Findings show patrons are frequently using the building from 9:00am -10:00am in Lucky Ones Coffee waiting for the Library to open; the data also indicates that library usage has declined significantly during the 8:00pm-9:00pm hour.