I must be a little worn out because today was pretty much a blur. This evening we took a tour of the Nashville Public Library and I was able to take a few pictures before my batteries ran out (the ones in my camera and mine ;0) These photos certainly don’t do it justice - it is really worth going to see in person. You can see more pictures of this library on my flickr page at http://www.flickr.com/photos/mindykittay.
Today was a slightly shorter day. I sense that we’ll all take good advantage of our time “off post”.
Some of today looked at management styles. As a manager for most of my career, and as a recent participant in another immersion workshop on leadership a few months ago, much of this was a review. I did note a few things that stuck out for me.
False Involvement - used by June Garcia - is when we put together a committee just to say we put together a “team”, but we had a clear decision all along. The committee members, or team, really have no input into the decision, or they shouldn’t have input. A good manager knows when a team approach is necessary and when it’s a waste of everybody’s time.
Both June Garcia and Sandra Nelson talked about control. It turns out, control freak though I may be, I don’t have a whole lot of it. The good news is, there’s not a lot over which I have no control, either. We work and live in the manage or influence zones instead, providing everyone with the means to have impact on decisions are made below, at, or above their peer group.
Finally, my favorite “not on the agenda, not part of the curriculum, but generated by small group discussion” moment was this one: Management by Muffin, delightfully coined by Carrie Haverman of the Capital Area District Library (and previously a director in one of the smaller libraries in my service area, oddly enough) in Pennsylvania. Food is one of those things at meetings that makes everybody happy, even when they probably won’t be happy at a later point in the agenda. I couldn’t help think - are we simply practicing the ancient laws of hospitality? Do we exchange the muffin for civility from our guests? Hmmm, I need to buy more muffins…
This morning is a self evaluation of individual management styles. Personally, I know that my style is to “get things done,” within a culture of “Country Club Management.” The conflict is difficult while at the same time stimulating.
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:
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.
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.
Discussed that we must truly believe that the value of a public service is measured by use, not so much a feeling or what we learned in library school. How about your verticle file? Staff spend a great deal of time to make a excellent verticle file. Is it used? Or is the verticle file an example of “irrelevant excellence?”
We must make choices for scarce resources; does work on the verticle file, as a example, make the cut as a budget priority.
The first thing that became apparent during the morning lecture was that Planning for Results (PFR) could be an excellent way to approach the many changes that our Library will be going through as a result of becoming a District and receiving additional funding for capital improvements. PFR is a method used to determine how to support new services by reallocating existing resources. PRF is also used as a tool to allocate new resources. It would be beneficial for our library to take this opportunity to do both at the same time.
Of course we all want our Library to be thought of as excellent by our community. Excellence for a library is defined by the PFR as “…when library services match user needs, interests and priorities.” Accomplishing this can be assisted by using Community Based Planning. The Board has already determined that some type of community input will be the basis for determining the direction for capital improvements. My thought is that we could use this opportunity to determine the direction for all aspects of the library. The way it is described in the handout is, “The New Planning for Results process begins by asking key community stakeholders to identify a vision for the community served by the library, which helps library planners determine what the community values and how the library can make a contribution toward achieving the community vision. This, in turn, helps them to answer the questions ‘What difference does the library make?’”
Key community stakeholders in our County might be: a high level administrator from the local community college, the head of Health and Human Resources at the County, the President of Student Council from the largest High Schools, the Editor of the Post Independent, heads of the Chamber of Commerce and the Downtown Development Leaders, Head of the PTA, Superintendent of Schools, the Head of a Latino Community Service Organization, the President of Alpine Bank, a County Commissioner, etc. This does not mean that the library would not listen to residents opinions regarding capital improvement projects, it would just happen after the Board determined the priorities for the Library as a whole based on the results of the Community Based Planning.
Once the community needs are determined the Board and staff use them to determine where the library fits in and then selects the service responses that the library will focus on. PLA is working on new service responses. Previously there were 13 and we have them listed in our current Strategic Plan. There are 17 proposed service responses. By focusing on a limited number of these it prevents the library from striving to be “all things to all people,” doing all things passably but nothing in an outstanding or excellent manner. They are listed below in alphabetical order: (Remember these are just a first draft – the final Service Responses may look a little different than these.)
1. Become Informed Citizens: Local, National, and World Affairs
2. Build Successful Enterprises: Business and Non-Profit support
3. Connect to the Online World: Internet Utility (the physical connection to the Internet from the Library)
4. Create Young Readers: Emergent Literacy
5. Discover Our Heritage: Genealogy and More
6. Express Creativity: User-Produced Content
7. Explore Our Community: Past, Present and Future
8. Get Fast Facts: Ready Reference
9. Learn to Find, Evaluate, and Use Information: Information Literacy
10. Learn to Read and Write: Adult and Family Literacy
11. Make Career Choices: Job and Career Development
12. Make Informed Decisions: Health, Wealth and Other Life Choices
13. Satisfy Curiosity: Lifelong Learning
14. Stimulate Imagination: Reading, Viewing and Listening for Pleasure
15. Succeed in School: Homework Help
16. Visit a Comfortable Place: Public Spaces
17. Welcome to America: Services for New Immigrants
This translates into finding out our community needs and then determining which ones the library can best fulfill. Staff and the Board use this information to determine which service responses the library will focus on and become “excellent” at. From the service responses specific goals and objectives are set and resources are allocated to achieve those goals. Certainly our capital improvements would tie into this process too.
For example, the Community Based Planning phase may determine that there is a pressing need for the children of Garfield County to receive the education they need to secure employment that provides a living wage. The Board and Staff then determine if the library is suited to meet this community need and what other organizations in the County are working to meet this need. The decision can then be made to either collaborate with the most effective of these organizations or to set the need as a priority service for the library. If they set it as a priority, it would most likely fall under #15: Succeed in School: Homework Help, as the service response. From here service goals would be set. It might look something like “Children in Garfield County will have a wide variety of programs, services and materials to help them succeed in school.” The next step would be to set an objective(s) to measure progress toward reaching the goal. We might measure something such as the number of children accessing our on-line, interactive, tutorial services and set an amount by which that will increase annually. From here, specific resources are allocated to achieve the goal, such as funding in the budget for Tutor.com. And finally there is evaluation: Did we reach our goal? Should it still be a goal? Is there a better or additional way to achieve this goal now?
This is all simplified and there was much discussion on the steps to achieve all that I have mentioned above but I think this gives a general outline of a very exciting and informative day at Boot Camp II!
Mindy
If you really want to plan to afford library service to your community in the future, it’s “pay me now or pay me later.” Learn to live within your means. We learned that we cannot afford to keep all the library services we do now since tax dollars have been tapped out, especially staff intensive old-fashioned reference services - we need to change to be light on our feet like-reader’s advisory, ready reference.
We had quite a discussion on the future of old-fashioned staff intensive reference service and concluded that traditional reference service is DEAD! Librarians need to reinvent their jobs.
Real planning means to step on toes to move forward.
Fifty-four participants, including twelve from the Bucks County Free Library in Pennsylvania, gathered today in Nashville for the PLA Results Boot Camp. Each of us introduced ourselves and gave our goals for attending. I am one of four attending from the Pioneer Library System in central Oklahoma. We hope to develop a training program for branch managers using the information learned this week. We are also ready for a second round of the Planning for Results process.
The first day focused upon laying a foundation for our library services through the Planning for Results process. Several participating libraries have implemented Planning for Results, but those with experience were as interested as those without, because we received new information for the next level of our planning.
Sandra Nelson and June Garcia, Consultants and Boot Camp presenters, provided copies of the latest version of the Proposed New Service Responses. Those who know the Public Library Service Responses will remember that the 1996 version has thirteen service clusters and that the language is “textbook-ish”. The proposed version - a work in progress - has seventeen and the language is more active and exciting:
1. Become Informed Citizens: Local, National, and World Affairs
2. Build Successful Enterprises: Business and Non-Profit Support
3. Connect to the Online World: Internet utility
4. Create Young Reaers: Emergent Literacy
5. Discover Our Heritage: Genealogy and More
6. Express Creativity: User-Produced Content
7. Explore Our Community: Past, Present, and Future
8. Get Fast Facts: Ready Reference
9. Learn to Find, Evaluate, and Use Information: Information Literacy
10. Learn to Read and Write: Adult and Family Literacy
11. Make Career Choices: Job and Career Development
12. Make Informed Decisions: Health, Wealth, and Other Life Choices
13. Satisfy Curiosity: Lifelong Learning (the group suggested a change - to Encourage Curiosity)
14. Stimulate Imagination: REading, Viewing and Listening for Pleasure
15. Succeed in School: Homework Helpo
16. Visit a Comfortable Place: Public Spaces
17. Welcome to America: Services for New Immigrants
Participants applauded the active nature of the new Service Responses. Still, there were suggestions for changes and the document will continue to be edited for a few weeks. Groups worked to develop goals and objectives using the Proposed New Service Responses document and participants and the trainers felt that the new wording encouraged better goals. It was rewarding to have a small part in the development of this document.
Tomorrow the topic is “Planning is Not Doing: Implement for Results.” Stay tuned!
Taps are playing on day one of PLA’s Results Boot Camp II. We are quite a mixed bag of librarians, serving very different customers. We come from library systems, consulting agencies that are tax supported (I’m in that group), small libraries, big libraries, state libraries, and more. This is how I summed up our day in my notes:
So, basically, if you’re doing the right thing by your library, there’s a good chance you’re making somebody unhappy. As long as that’s not the majority of your constituency, you’ve got your priorities straight. The staff don’t work for the library, they work for the public. We all have things we are good at, and things we like to do, and if you’re really lucky, they’re the same thing. But the community committee is there to make sure that when you spend their money on library service, you’re worried about what they get, not what you do.
This comes down to doing fewer things and doing them really well. We can’t continue to survive, let alone thrive, if we can’t make tough decisions and allocate our resources to what the majority of the public wants from us. We worry so much about our roles in the future (will libraries be needed, will I have a job that fits with what I know how to do, will Google/Borders/Amazon put us out of business) that we lose sight of the fact that the staff needs to be flexible, do their job as it is defined by public needs, and welcome new training and roles. When staff become inflexible it’s time to question whether or not they “can ‘t” do their job or “won’t”. If they won’t, then maybe the library isn’t the best use of their skills.
As Sandra Nelson said today, it’s not an easy time to be a librarian. If we look to our communities and let them help us improve our libraries, then we make the job easier but less comfortable. But oh, so exciting.
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