Service Response Discussion: Community Referral
August 29th, 2006 by Andrea MercadoThis post is part of a series designed to further discussion of the PLA Results service responses, designed in 1998 to describe “what a library does for, or offers to, the public in an effort to meet a set of well-defined community needs.”
The bulleted comments below were gathered in conference sessions by the PLA Results team, in an effort to update the current service responses, which were originally written almost ten years ago. The PLA Results group is looking to the community for feedback on how to update these service responses to better reflect current public library methods and standards.
“A library that provides a Commons environment helps address the need of people to meet and interact with others in their community and to participate in public discourse about community issues.” (definition care of the PLA Results site). The current version of the Community Referral service response, is available for review on the PLA Results web site (the file is an Adobe .pdf file, and requires Adobe Reader to view).
Share your feedback on the current Community Referral service response, as well as the starter comments listed below, by leaving a comment on this post page. You can help PLA Results bring public library service responses into the 21st century!
Community Referral Discussion Group Comments
Should this service response be renamed?
- We could call it Community Information.
- We could call it Community Awareness.
- This should be called Local Information. Libraries should know what is going on in the community but not be responsible for referral.
Is it still relevant?
- This is selected by some libraries.
- There is no harm in having it as a service response which libraries can select or not based on community need.
Go back to the Service Response Discussion Index.
Tags: PLA, PLA Blog, service responses
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October 17th, 2006 at 11:51 pm
Concur that Community Information is a really good name for this and Referral implies something more intensive and personal that is not really our role. This service response seems really good for a library that is responsible for maintaining local electronic community directory and bulletin board information files as part of its website.
November 1st, 2006 at 8:12 pm
I concur on Community Information. Our library maintains a community referral directory and will continue to do so. It’s accessed through the web and is a one-of-a-kind resource in the community. But the Library as Commons (“A library that provides a Commons environment helps address the need of people to meet and interact with others in their community and to participate in public discourse about community issues.” ) seems to be a slightly different role, and “Community Information” would include all sorts of informal Commons type interchanges and informational needs.