Service Responses – Criteria

What criteria do you use to determine the activities you do in your library?

All things are possible with time and money. The problem is we don’t have enough time and certainly not enough money to do everything we want to do. With a defined set of criteria we can determine which activities are successful and which are not. For those activities determined to be unsuccessful we can reallocate dollars and time to things that will make a greater impact. Sounds easy, but problems arise when things that libraries traditionally do turn out to not have a very high ROI. Is that book club that gets the same 6 people each month an effective use of resources? How many circs are generated by the bulletin board that took 3 hours to assemble? What could have been done with the time that was spent on these activities that would have reached more people? Libraries need to think about their target audience and if a significant portion of that audience is taking advantage of an activity. Are the activities meeting the objectives in the strategic plan? Are the activities something that the target audience really wants and loves? When tough choices have to be made, and they do have to be made, it is essential to have a defined set of criteria to make those determinations a little easier.