Get outside the lines

"Libraries are dynamic centers for engagement that help everyone in your local community be their best. To shift perceptions, we need to demonstrate how the library is more relevant than ever before.
Let’s not just tell people how libraries have changed; let’s show them.
Outside the Lines is a weeklong celebration demonstrating the creativity and innovation happening in libraries. Whether your organization is large or small, a school library or a public library, you can participate by hosting at least one event or campaign that:

1. Gets people thinking – and talking – about libraries in a different way.
2. Showcases the library out in the community as well as in the library.
3. Highlights how your library is relevant to people’s lives.
4. Represents your local community.
5. Is active versus passive – gets people engaged.
6. Is extraordinary and unexpected.
7. Most importantly, is fun!"

That is lifted verbatim from www.getoutsidethelines.org - now I will find it again if I go looking for it

Outcome Measurements: Practical Considerations

(Notes from a session delivered by Rebecca Jones of Brampton Library.  These are notes I am mostly recording for my personal recollection, they might not be coherent to others.)

• Key questions:  What?  So what?  Now what?
• It is good for outsiders to look at your data - they might bring a different perspective - this is a great role for the board
• You need to understand the perspectives of others if you want to convince / influence them
• Libraries don't tend to have a culture of assessment
• most measures convey past performance
• Our measures don't align with interests of decision-makers (perspective)
• Many partnerships do not include outcome goals or joint measures

"Good to Great" (recommended book)

• Identifying and illustrating value depends on conversations with your stakeholders
• The first conversation shouldn't be the one where success is presented
• More isn't necessarily better - more can cloud the issue and the message

Successful organizations:

• Clarity of purpose
• Understand the external community they work in
• Use performance measure that fit the culture

Surveys are good for evaluating / measuring outcomes and impacts [different from the way we usually think of them in AB - here they are often used as a general needs assessment/service planning, but she's saying they are good for backward-looking, targeted evaluation of a specific service)

• Ask councillors, etc.: what constitutes personal success for them?  "What would a successful term look like for you?"
• If you can meet emotional / value needs (as opposed to the merely practical...)

Seven measurement areas [I think this is from ALA's Project Outcome]:

• Civic / community engagement
• Digital inclusion
• Early childhood literacy
• Economic development
• Education / lifelong learning
• Job skills
• Summer reading

United Airlines and the institutional trap

United Airlines recently lost most of a billion dollars in stock value after a bloodied customer was dragged off an airplane.  The incident was bad but the tone-deaf response from the CEO was worse.  What was he thinking when he defended the indefensible?

This is the institutional trap.  It captures experts and professionals by turning their knowledge against them.  They know everything about the inner workings of their institutions, but they come to believe that the belly of the beast is the entire world.  Their analytical toolkit is a box they can't escape.

What to do with data

After I do a community needs assessment meeting, I generally hand a pile of flip chart pages to the hosting library, offer a ten minute verbal debrief, get in my car and drive away.  What is that library supposed to do with that data after I am gone?

I suggest the following simple steps to hammer raw data into insights and conclusions:

First, just look at the data.  Work all the way through it.  Read every page, try to understand the format and what is being said.

Second, think about what it means.  Any initial impressions?  Anything jump out at you?  Any patterns?

Third, crunch the data.  Count repetitions, tally up yeas and nays.  Try making some bar charts or pie charts out of the data.

Fourth, think about it some more.  Identity themes and give them descriptive names.  Try to collapse categories.  Look for the bigger deeper story.

Finally, come to some conclusions.  Decide what it all means, pick what is important.

This is boiled down from other stuff.  I will try to attach some citations which I would like to keep track of.

A new model for library service planning

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.

Lethbridge Public Library's "Have a Seat" Campaign

Lethbridge Public Library did a really good community engagement campaign called "Have a Seat".  It was good for two reasons:

First, they came up with a great way to talk to the community.  They got a red leather chair and they took it around to community events, the local pool, wherever they could find people, and invited the public to sit down and consider one question: "How do you fit a community into a library?"  I love this!  The chair is a vivid, symbol of the campaign that catches attention and invites people to engage. Once they are seated, they are in a posture that naturally invites lingering and contemplation.

The question is really good too.  I love how they limited it to one open ended question rather than a survey.  The question is open ended but it is also somewhat complex, requiring some thought to understand; and it is subtly leading, suggesting that fitting the community into the library is the issue at hand.

They talked 700 people.  They took a different approach with "community builders," sitting them in the chair and interviewing them (asking a series of questions).  Very thoughtful way of extending the visual metaphor of the chair into different types of engagement.

The second thing they did really well was analyzing and compiling the results.  You don't get any quantitative information with one open ended question, so how do you crunch the data? They identified what they called "story themes", common refrains which surfaced over and over again, and they gave them compelling names.  There were six of them:

• We Love the Library!
• People Want More of the Good Stuff (less of the not so good)
• Well…I Didn’t Know That!
• By the Way I’m Having Just a Little Trouble Using the eResources
• Since My Life is Filled to the Max (it makes a difference to me that the Library is close to where I live or work)
• It’s Important that the Library be a Community Hub (a place to learn, discuss, interact, have fun and sometimes expand who we are).

The Trouble with PLA Service Responses

I do a lot of community needs assessment using the PLA's Strategic Planning for Results process.  It has a lot of strengths (focused on community needs, etc.) but some weaknesses too.

SP4R includes "service responses", a list of 18 services which libraries can deliver in response to community needs.  The service responses have their uses; for starters, they are a good summary of the wide range of things that a modern public library can do.  Also, they focus on the benefit that the community receives from the service, as opposed to the activity of the library.  For example:

"Residents will have someone to answer their questions on a wide array of topics."  

See how that is focused on residents, and not on the library?  This is the right way to describe services when you are talking to the public.  It  is good advocacy language. 

There are however two problems with service responses.  First, they can lead to a loss of context when collecting public input.  For example, lets say the community tells you there is a teenage graffiti epidemic, and determines that an appropriate service response to that would be 

"Express Creativity: Create and Share Content.  (Residents will have the services and support they need to express themselves by creating original print, video, audio or visual content.)"

The idea being that the little hoodlums can come be creative in the library rather than on garage doors.

The problem arises when down the line, someone receives this public input and starts deciding what the library will do to implement that service response.  If they don't have all the information, they might decide to do a seniors' painting program.  Which would be fine, except it misses the reason why the service response was picked in the first place.

This is an artificial sort of example, but the point is that when you move from 1) community need to 2) these very broad and general service responses and then 3) into a specific library activity there may be a disconnect between #1 and #3.  Really.  I've seen it happen.

The second problem with the service responses is what I call "takeout menu syndrome."  If you let your community representatives pick service responses, they are liable to pick the ones that sound good to them for whatever reason.  No matter how much you tell them to pick based on community needs, they will tend to like one or the other, just because it sounds good to them.  And they will pick that one, as if it was moo goo gai pan and they were hungry.  Mmm, moo goo gai pan.

How to avoid these problems?  I do show community groups the service responses, as part of my effort to show them the range of things that libraries can do.  I do not ask them to pick service responses.  When it comes time to talk about what the library should do (that is step 3, after we have identified community needs and discussed all the things that public libraries can do), I simply ask them to pick the community needs that the library should respond to and to say whatever they want about what exactly the library should do in response.  After that it is up to the library to refine and polish that input and to reference Service Responses if they so choose.