Key Customer Groups & Market Segments

Like the Kelvin Smith Library, the Freedman Center serves the students, faculty, and staff of the Case community; and, as with the KSL, the Freedman Center shares its primary stakeholder relationships. There are at least five primary stakeholder relationships: the administration and faculty of Case; the students, which includes the Student Senate Committee on University Libraries and all students, both undergraduate and graduate, and continuing education students in the colleges named above; the staff of Case Western Reserve University; the alumni, and members of the University Circle or Cleveland community; finally, internal customers at the Kelvin Smith Library.

Interests for the administration and faculty may include archiving resources already in existence. For instance, a Professor Emeritus may wish to have fifty years of medical slides archived or put onto a CD-ROM; the administration may be interested in how these images can be transformed into university assets for the whole Case community. Additionally, faculty may be interested in how they can use technology to garner greater interest from students, or instill the desire in students to find new ways to look at and present their work. An excellent initiative is the Freedman Fellows program sponsored by KSL, Instructional Technology and Academic Computing (ITAC), and the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education (UCITE), encourages the use of information and instructional technologies to redesign courses and build teaching tools that support the development of information and research skills objectives for undergraduate students. As a part of the program, faculty members are given money, resources, and guidance to develop their initiatives utilizing the services of the Freedman Center.

Students benefit from the services and facilities of the Freedman Center in very much the same way that members of the faculty and administration do. Students are encouraged to use the multimedia and language learning resources to create vibrant, interactive learning experiences, both for their own procedural experience and for the benefit of their classmates. Additionally, it is hoped that creating materials in a new format, using new tools, encourages new ways of seeing and viewing the material that is being presented, thus heightening the learning experience (and the awareness that is created among those creating and viewing projects). An excellent example is inspired by a theater project locally that wished to examine the experiences of the Northeast Ohio community during the desegregation and busing experiments of the late 60s and early 70s. The idea was to gather oral histories from different segments of the population—people who lived through the experience: students bused to new schools, parents, educators, members of law enforcement, and so on. Then, gather the oral histories, transcribe them, and have actors enact them on stage. Such an experiment could be greatly enhanced by the addition of multimedia elements, including video, audio, and interactive presentation software. What is more, perhaps, is that such a process and experience is far more real and permanent than simply reading a book or journal article. The process of learning about an historic event, forming questions, seeking individuals, and interviewing them is, in itself, a highly complex and ambitious process. But recording it by camera, both video and audio, and further engaging the post-production process and engaging in the selection process of presentation greatly expands the depth, breadth, and reach of such a project. Such a project can be archived permanently and become part of not only the Special Collections at Case, but a digital asset as well: one that can be shared across campuses, cities, and time. Such a project also encourages use of the full-range of materials available to the Case community: the Freedman Center, Special Collections, the Western Reserve Historical Society, and the people resources in our neighborhoods.

Staff benefit from the Freedman Center in much the same way as administrators, faculty, and students. Access for staff may be of a more personal nature, however, allowing staff members to convert personal items into digital assets that they can preserve for their families: such items could include Hi-8 or VHS-C tapes, 16mm tapes, slides from camping trips, and much more.

Alumni and community members benefit from the Freedman Center, too. If the example of the student project is not enough to convince readers, then it should be expressly pointed out that institutions like the Kelvin Smith Library hold hundreds of years of documents, photographs, and other materials that are precious and irreplaceable to the communities in which they reside. Digital initiatives not only make these materials available to the community generally (far more accessible than they are currently), but also act to ensure their preservation by ensuring that these unique items are handled only when absolutely necessary. In addition, all members of the Case community are encouraged to use the Freedman Center resources in creating Digital Assets that enhance the cultural and historical understanding of Northeast Ohio.

Internal customers could be one of the strongest markets for the Freedman Center. Certainly the Preservation Department and the Special Collections Department have great potential as consumers of the services and facilities of the Freedman Center’s planetary scanner. As mentioned in the section above on student and community stakeholders, access to some archived and special collections is rigorously guarded. In such cases, digital copies or digital assets are an excellent solution. Digitizing an asset can lead to the circulation of material that otherwise would be restricted or ignored. Both the Preservation Department and the Special Collections Department will likely take advantage of the opportunity afforded by the Freedman Center and be an excellent partner in the development of any processes, programs, and service offerings. In addition, within Case, other departments and division, such as the Dittrick Museum or University Archives may benefit from services offered by the Freedman Center.

The requirements and expectations of the Freedman Center by all of its key customer groups include a service environment that is both professional and knowledgeable. All users of the Freedman Center have the expectation that the Center staff will be professional in concern, demeanor, and in the handling of their materials; as well as knowledgeable in the hardware and software available and used within the Center for digital asset conversion. To ensure a quality customer experience the Freedman Center has implemented a Customer Feedback system and regularly analyses the results and output of this system to adjust or correct its operations.

The differences in requirements and expectations between key customer groups, for the most part, is negligible, in that all customer groups should rightly have the expectation of receiving professional, knowledgeable, and high-quality service from the Freedman Center. The differences that exist might be more in how service is provided. For instance, a faculty member might want a service provided without desiring the knowledge of how the service is provided; whereas a student may want to know exactly how a service is performed in order that he or she may do it in the future. The Freedman Center positions itself as a self-service organization and had only recently entertained the notion of providing a “drop off” service. Such a service will be addressed in the business plan for the Freedman Center.