Veteran’s Suggestion Brings StackMap to Fordham Law Library

At The Maloney Library we base our success on how well our library services meet the needs of our users and enables them to do what they want to do—research, learn or find. We make as many information-driven changes as possible and are always asking what can we do to improve our service for our patrons. There’s a strong culture of users-first and I think that helps to overcome any opposition to change.

We started doing user testing more than a year before we opened the new library and the first person that I interviewed was a student here who is a Marine Corps Veteran of the war in Afghanistan.

We spent an hour going through the catalogue and told me, It would be really cool if you guys had a map of your stacks

so I wouldn’t have to learn the call number classification and look at the call number chart.

Time is limited and students need to find what they need as soon as possible. What if I could find what I needed on a map? So I said, I’ll have to look into that and see if that would be possible.

Soon after that I learned about StackMap from a colleague and we looked into it and realized it would be great. In the summer of 2014, we moved into a brand new library and signed up with StackMap. It had been our plan that StackMap would be part of the new building’s unveiling.

We got StackMap fully up and running for opening day!

It was this veteran’s first year when I did the interview and when I ran into him in the hall, in the new building, he was in his third year. I told him that we’d heard him, made the change and implemented something called StackMap. His response was,

Wow, I can’t believe you guys listened to me.

StackMap is as great as we thought. It saves a lot of time and it makes our collection less intimidating for people. It’s really simple to update via the admin database. It’s affordable and the customer support is really good. It’s really popular with people who are using hard copy materials in our library.

Not long ago, the director of Fordham University's main library came to us and asked us about StackMap and now they have it too.

—Thomas Kaczorowski, Systems and Emerging Technologies Librarian, The Maloney Library, Fordham University School of Law