PLA Blog

What a draining, stressful day! I think I can sum up my thoughts on day 2 of camp in a really great definition of how we provide a lot of our service, the brainchild of June
Garcia’s working partner Ron Dubberly of Dubberly Garcia Associates, Inc.:

irrelevant excellence = performing really well at something you shouldn’t be doing

What does this mean for our libraries? If we focus on what our taxpayers actually want from us, we can be good at serving our public, not on individual tasks. We need to constantly be vigilant about our services’ effectiveness. If we can’t demonstrate that we are reaching a large enough portion of a service’s target audience, that the service also supports our objectives, and the public at least likes it, we need to stop.

Am I saying to deliberately look at storytime and validate that it is effective? Yes. Am I saying to deliberately look at our reference service and be able to explain to the average taxpayer why I spend X number of dollars on something that only 5% of the entire population actually uses? Yes. But libraries are not risk tolerant environments, are they? It’s that vocal minority that we just want to keep quiet because, after all, we’re a profession mainly comprised of shushers or reformed shushers. It’s that silent majority we need to be seeking, serving, and satisfying.

I think the biggest philosophy challenge I took from today was to look at how we’ve treated staff over the last 10 years. No more money, or if there is more, it’s not enough. More services, more programs, more more more. Envision a staff person as a scale. You can only carry so much weight on each arm before the entire body suffers, not just the arms. Things slide and fall off, we become weak. We have piled on and piled on, without ever taking anything away. As a manager, I am guilty of this same activity. So, I pledge to never add services without weighing how the service actually produces results (ie whether or not it’s even worth doing) and then finding a way to relieve that wobbly pile of something that may sound nice, or that we just like to do, or something we personally feel is a good library service, but aren’t serving the greatest number of people as effectively as possible.

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

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 7:05 pm 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.