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Rebecca Jones posted this in Performance measurement on August 15th, 2011 I had another “wth?” experience at a public library yesterday. (For those of you who know me well, you know that’d I am much more likely to have said “wtf?” but I’m being diplomatic with “what the heck?” here.) Here’s the situation: our daughter struggles with mental illness & addictions. She & I were room-hunting for her in an urban area where she can attend programming. We’d look at several places & then wanted to check out some other places, for which we needed the web — both for email & a bit of searching. I’d been using my Blackberry, but the screen is pretty darned small, so I was delighted to locate the public library, and even more delighted that it was open! I encourage her REGULARLY, to find public libraries for directions to social services & to access the web. When she was in Hamilton I encouraged her to use Hamilton Public Library. Hamilton Public Library is outstanding, and is to be commended, for their services for those struggling in our communities. So I assumed the urban library we were entering yesterday (NOT Hamilton Public Library) would be as wonderful for her to deal with as HPL had been. I was delighted that we’d be able to benefit from the public library in a city (not to be named) and that she’d now know where this particular branch was for future usage in this new city (not to be named).
However (yes, there’s a “however”) as we went through the
Continue reading Another “wth?” Library Policy
Rebecca Jones posted this in Performance measurement on August 10th, 2011 Alexandra Yarrow is a brilliant young librarian (& incredible athlete, too!). She posted a thoughtful post to her blog, Only Connect, yesterday: (Measuring) The Value of Libraries. I’m reposting my comments on her post below just because the whole issue of measures is coming to the fore : we need to deal with measures now — seriously — collectively — critically (not being critical, but thinking critically). What types of measures are meaningful in the digital environment? Read Alexandra’s post and then my musings:
“Well done! You go girl!
I have been fascinated by the issue of performance measures and “value” of libraries for many years. When I speak or teach about measures I warn ppl at the outset that there isn’t a ‘magic measure’ and it is hard, complex work, so if you want to leave now I won’t be offended. It is hard work to identify, gather, interpret, manage and communicate those few measures that are meaningful for decision-makers at the time. Libraries continue to struggle for a few reasons (IMHO):
1. libraries need different measures for different purposes: the measures needed for management purposes (what’s being used, how much is being used, by who, etc.) differ from the measures needed to convey value and impact. Yet many libraries (ok not ALL – don’t jump on me!) continue to communicate too many measures & too much detail, which just confuses people & messes up the message (“me thinks though dost protesteth too much” — is that the saying?) Keep
Continue reading Measuring the Value of Libraries continued…
The only problem with Computers in Libraries is that I can only attend one session at a time. There were so many sessions I wanted to be at today, and those I did attend were exactly what I look for in conference sessions: interesting, idea-generating learning events.
What keeps conference organizers awake at night? The nightmare that a keynote speaker may not arrive on time to address several hundred attendees. Although this happened this morning, Jane, Tom Hogan and other Information Today organizers handled the situation gracefully quickly creating a panel with Roy Tennant, Stephen Abram, Marshall Breeding and Dick Kaiser who discussed the issue of e-books-publishers-lending-libraries. My takeaways from this session:
Although many in the library sector have been challenging Harper-Collins, the sector should focusing on Simon and Schuster who won’t license e-books to libraries at all Overdrive has been doing their best with e-books in the library environment Google’s agreement for every library to have “one Google terminal” for Google-digitized content does not include downloading or printing rights.
Madeline Barratt, Strategy & Performance Manager for Enfield Libraries in the UK spoke of London’s Libraries Consortium. Growing from 3 members to 15 in a couple of short years, the Consortium is yielding real benefits for all the boroughs. Madeline’s articulate, humourous delivery was engaging. My takeaways:
“Challenges grow like weeds” even for those who fiercely believe in public libraries, collaboration & consortia One challenge is to maintain a collaborative model as membership grows; they are developing their governance model
Continue reading CIL2011 Day 1: Stories Not Statistics
Part 3: Knowledge Professionals……measuring our performance
by Susan Lipsey
In my last two posts I’ve written about marketing knowledge professionals’ services to our clients and defining our value to the business in their language. The third and complementary piece is performance measures. A profession’s ability to measure what it does allows the profession to establish and maintain best practices and accountability. It also allows the profession to manage competency development, evaluate against goals and compare work against that of peers. And our profession is no different.
Performance measures must be defined in terms of clients’ work and difference our services make to their work. Client interviews, focus groups and client discussions are all necessary steps in determining what your performance measures may look like. Performance measures are organization-dependent and change as the priorities and activities of the organization change. Documented processes and requirements for performance measures support replicating results and training new staff.
Some of my experiences establishing performance measures for research teams include:
- With a new team of inexperienced researchers,the goal of the performance measure was ensuring “service consistency”; in other words,
Continue reading Guest Blog Post: #3 – Knowledge Professionals’ Performance Measures
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