I have been doing library service planning for a while now, mostly following PLA's Strategic Planning for Results methodology. It's a good process for many situations:
- It's prescriptive: it tells you what to do every step of the way.
- It's complete: everything plotted out to the last detail, and things like meeting agendas and worksheets are included.
- It's community focused: it starts with community needs and picks library service in response to those needs. Also, it empowers the community to define those community needs and pick the library service responses themselves.
- It includes outcome oriented descriptions of library services (Library Service Responses).
Like anything, though, SP4R has its limitations:
- Prescriptive isn't always good. Sometimes you want to customize.
- It includes only one way to do community needs assessment (public meetings).
- Those damn Service Responses! I half love them and half hate them. They are an inspirational summary of all the things libraries can do for people - but they are text heavy, they categorize services in an odd way sometimes and they give core and niche services on the same weight.
My answer is to move away from this prescriptive process towards a toolkit and set of principles. I will be presenting this at the Alberta Library Conference this spring.
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