PLA Blog

Today’s mantra was, “If you want something to change you have to do something different!” Sandra Nelson (Boot Camp Instructor)

I came to the painful realization today that I have many misconceptions about what our library does and how effective it is in achieving our goals. But the good part was that I don’t think I was alone.

Does our library want to:

1) Reach as many of our population as possible.

2) Be a viable public organization.

3) Be confident that we are putting our public funding to its best usage.

4) And, touch MORE lives. Of course we do! So how do we do this?

Well after today I know that it won’t be easy and it is going to be painful.

Here is the eye-opening example that we used today and seems very relevant to our library and community. The library serves a community that includes a large number of families with young children. The community is made up of primarily lower and middle class families and in most of these families both parents work. During our hypothetical planning process we decided that one of our goals should be that preschool children will develop a love of books and reading. In order to reach this goal we have set objectives that include increasing participation in programs by preschoolers, increasing circulation of preschool materials and increasing the number of preschool caregivers who believe that the library played an important role in introducing children to the love of books and reading.

Currently we offer the following services: preschool story time on Wednesday’s at 10:30am in the library, we have a very successful summer reading program targeted towards children who can read, and we maintain a collection of materials for preschoolers but we are not increasing its budget or making significant changes to the kinds of materials purchased. Now remember some of this is exactly what we are doing in our library and some is not – but it all ties into the lesson.

Next we discussed the value of these programs in relation to: 1) What percentage of the Target Audience are we reaching. 2) How well does this service contribute to producing a result towards our goal (preschool children will develop a love of books and reading). 3) If the service is reaching a substantial amount of the target audience and it is contributing to reaching our stated goals, how appealing is it to our audience?

So let’s start with story time. If most of our families are comprised of parents who work, how many of our target audience can actually make it to a story time at 10:30am on a weekday? If we are only able to reach a very small percentage of our target audience how well can this service contribute to our goal? How time intensive is story time for staff? Might there not be a better way to spend staff time and resources that would reach a much larger portion of our target audience?

Summer reading, our most successful program at the library, and which is designed for children who ALREADY read. There is no way this program is reaching any of our target audience for this goal. What sort of summer reading program would reach our target audience?

Selecting materials without making significant changes in the budget or the kind of materials purchased. Remember the mantra at the beginning of this post? Well here is where it became really clear to me. If you don’t change the budget and/or the types of materials you are buying there is no way you can increase circulation or raise the satisfaction level of the caregivers. If nothing is different, everything will stay the same.

Now came the fun part – what could we be doing instead:

• Take story time to where the kids are.
• Read-to-me-Program (Summer Reading for preschoolers)
• Reallocate some of the materials budget to provide more and different materials for preschoolers. (This means taking money away from other areas)
• Give workshops for Daycare Providers so they can do their own story times.
• Have weekend and holiday story times and activities for preschoolers.
• Implement a Born to Read program such as Imagination Library where children receive a library card at birth and free reading materials from the library on a regular basis.
• And at our library: Continue to Support and partner with the Raise a Reader Program which specifically targets this group of users and has the exact same goal and is well funded and already in place.

If we were to reallocate our staff time and other resources from programs that are only reaching a small portion of our community we would be able to find the time and resources to focus on new programs that will help us achieve our goals and reach a much larger segment of our population. And isn’t that really what we are trying to do?

A final note: My first thought about lots of new programs/stuff in the library was, who, and how, will we market it. The response was – if you need to continually have to market a service to get usage you are not offering the right service. Sort of the build it and they will come theory. (The Instructor did not mean that you eliminate informational marketing such as letting the public know about new hours or initially introducing a new service, program or technology). I then realized that just last month this theory was proved true when our new DiscoverStations increased public access computing by over 68% in the first month with NO marketing whatsoever.

Tags: conferences, PLA, PLA Blog, PLA Boot Camp 2006

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 at 9:45 am and is filed under PLA Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.