Libraries are often described as anchors of their communities. Their mission statements ramble on about the critical role libraries serve in meeting the needs of their communities. And it’s true! We have programming for technology tutoring, language classes, car seat installation, line dancing, video games, LEGOs, and community gardens. We lend tools and register voters and help people find jobs and apply for government programs. We tutor kids in homework centers and host bingo for seniors. We do a lot of stuff for our communities.
But we have limited budgets, and staffing, and space. It isn’t possible for us to provide every possible service our community might need. When library staff have to choose which programs and services to offer to fit within operating constraints, there are going to be some members of the community who do not get access to the resources they need.
Prioritizing resource allocation needs to involve dialog with the community that the library serves. It requires reevaluation of previous decisions to ensure that current programming continues to meet a real need in the community. It requires gathering feedback from the community about what they want to see at their library, and finding partners in the community to help realize that vision. The library cannot serve a community that it doesn’t communicate with.
Community needs change over time. The collection and analysis of the feedback from the community should inform the decision making process around how the library is going to change course in order to continue to effectively meet those needs. We need to do the most good for the most people. And in order to enact that course change, the library needs a strategic plan. It serves as a communication mechanism to let the community know that they’ve been heard and tell them how their needs will be addressed. It sets priorities for staff and resource allocation. It’s a pry bar to lever more funding from governments, organizations and individuals to support the library’s goals. And it’s a yardstick by which the community can measure how well the library has lived up to its commitments.
So, please don’t be like my local library. Don’t create your strategic plan without input from the community. Don’t leave it to a few people in a conference room to decide what should be in the plan. Don’t distribute it only privately and internally. And definitely don’t go years without updating it, including pandemic years that drastically change the needs of the community. This is a crucial piece of information for enabling collaboration between a library and the community it serves. Without it, the needs of the community cannot be effectively met, and people who want to support the library’s mission can’t know how to effectively do so. Publish your strategic plan visibly on your website. And publicize community feedback initiatives and ways for the community to help steer and support the library as it creates and executes that plan. Doing anything less risks misallocating resources and failing to meet the needs of the people the library serves.
And it also makes it really hard to write reports on them for library school.