How Princh helped RBKC attract users with easy to use printing services

Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea is a unique central London borough, home to places of great cultural importance, diverse communities and attractive streets and squares. We have the smallest population of any London borough at 160,000 but we have the third highest population density in London. We have over 4000 listed buildings and 177 English Heritage Blue Plaques.

Kensington and Chelsea Council runs 6 libraries in the borough as part of a Bi-Borough arrangement with Westminster libraries. We entered the Tri-Borough arrangement in 2012 which included Hammersmith and Fulham Libraries and were the first London authority to attempt something like that.

To this day all three boroughs use the same Library Management System and enable access to all three catalogues to their users, which provides exponentially increased offer to customers.

Before installing Princh, if people wanted to print, they had to become a member of the library, log into one of our public PCs and only then could they print. Customers often dropped in hoping to do a quick print of their documents and would be disappointed when told of the long procedure, which meant that they would often give up and do their printing elsewhere.

This was inconvenient for both our customers and the library. Therefore, our goal was to offer an efficient service and also realise some income from printing. Princh resolved both problems and now we are able to provide an efficient service with wireless printing for both non-members and members.

The implementation was very simple from the staff’s point of view. We received a short introduction in a conference call, which was sufficient to roll the service out. We have had no problems with introducing Princh. The Princh user guide posters provide a useful, simple guide which is easy to follow.

Princh enables us to offer printing facilities to nonmembers or to members who would prefer to print from their own device(s), rather than using the computer in the library. The possibility to print wirelessly helps the library to offer a consistent service to all users, as not all the people who come to the library are members. It also helps the library with income generation and prevents the loss of income caused by people being unable or unwilling to do their printing through the library computers.