- Highest level of service to all users
- Qualified staff
- Collection
- Hours of service
- Appropriate
- Defined at the local level
- Usefully organized
- Accessible
- Resources
- Books
- Tape/cd
- Video/dvd
- databases
- Equitable service policies
- Non-discriminatory
- Reasonable circ policies
- Equitable access
- Physical access to the building and materials
- Hours
- Accurate, unbiased responses
- Ref librarian shouldn’t give their opinion
- From a reliable source
- & courteous responses to all request
- obvious
- Code was written as a guide
- Five things decision ought to be
- Variety of options
- People are not the problem
- Problem, not opinions
- Objective criteria, not emotions
- Criteria to determine effectiveness
- What makes a decision effective?
- Evaluating Effectiveness
- From PLA
- Effectiveness can be measures by three elements, each of which has a five level scale
- Target Audience
- Result produced
- Audience response
- SWOT analysis
- Strengths
- Weaknesses
- Opportunities
- Threats
- Sacred Cow
- In use by PLA since 2000
- Look at what’s “always been done this way” & see what could be changed
- Things for which you don’t know why its done that way
- Ingrained habits
- Good to do with a group of people that are working together
- Used to resolve issues
- Circulation staff (good area to use this method)
- Needs Decision Tree
- Her new favorite
- Good tool for many types of decisions
- 1st question: how well suited is the library to meeting this need
- Go through the flowchart answering yes/no, well/not
- Helps people identify things they cannot do
- An attendee suggested maybe libraries should consider offering Internet access to homes. (Becoming an ISP in essence.) This was not well accepted by the others in the room, including myself.
- At this point the discussion seriously degenerated into discussion on what services the library should or should not be offering, not a discussion on how to make decisions.
- Start with the mission/vision statement of the library.
- What is the library’s goal?
- Does what you’re trying to decide, match that mission/vision?
- Public librarians tend to live in the past
- Patterns work, then the patterns change
- i.e. computers & the Internet
- Limited resources, how do you divvy up the resources?
- Public libraries tend to just keep adding resources without taking others away as other public entities do
- Determine what it is the community wants
- What does the staff/facility/budget have the capacity to provide
- Gather data, set priorities
- Reallocate resources as needed
- Your responsibility as a trustee is to make the best decision you can for the library/public you serve
- Handout: quotations (relevant & humorous) regarding ethical decisions
