PLANNING: BROAD GOALS DOCUMENT
NOTE: I've re-structured this document to put the specific goals under the broad summaries, and to try to simplify and consolidate some of the points. I don't think I've removed any ideas. Please feel free to re-structure it another way.-Stephen
The mission of the Albany County Public Library is to meet the needs of the public by offering open access to a diverse collection of materials, a friendly environment, and community-based programs to encourage learning throughout life
General goals:
- Evaluate and update policies, procedures, and plan to improve access, service, and responsiveness.
- Recruit, train, compensate, retain, and evaluate a diverse, friendly, competent staff.
- Continue, expand, and evaluate the collection to provide current materials with a variety of points of view and formats, incorporating new technologies.
- Increase/expand financial support to provide services, staff and collection in the upper quarter of the state’s public libraries.
- Promote, expand and evaluate programs to provide professional, proactive services that meet community needs
- Provide a clean, comfortable, friendly, ADA compliant environment for employees and users.
- Produce and implement a disaster plan.
Open Access
- The Albany County Public Library values a free, open and democratic learning environment in which all library patrons and staff are treated with respect without regard to differences of gender, race, color, national origin, religion, disability, age, and/or sexual orientation.
- The Albany County Public Library seeks to foster the pursuit of knowledge, the growth of creativity, the support of open inquiry, a respect for patron confidentiality, and a spirit of collaboration.
- The Albany County Public Library supports the principle that intellectual freedom is the foundation of a democratic society, and it subscribes to the American Library Association’s “Library Bill of Rights,” the “Freedom to Read Statement,” and the “Freedom to View Statement.”
SPECIFICS:
Services
- Meet community needs
- Promote services
- Provide proactive/ professional services
- survey
- Assess adding branches/services
- Improve services
Improve efficiency
- Objective: Make shifting responsibilities a positive thing for staff
- Create incentives for innovation and streamlining
- Objective: Evaluate use of staff time on tasks in terms of return on investment, putting past practices aside.
- Create positive accountability for department heads for use of staff time
Improve the collection
- Expand size and scope of collection
- Continue to work to remove obstacles to full spending of allocated funds for materials
- Evaluate
- Current materials
- Improve variety of formats available
- Increase audio-visual collection
- Incorporate new technologies
- Get patron input on what format's they might like to see (like Playstation games, for example)
- Varieties of points of view
- Get outside input on balance of library collection
- Encourage selectors to identify biases and adjust for them
Improve the Library Environment
- Improve Cleanliness
- Consider re-evaluating/enhancing cleaning service
- Maintain a more dust/dirt free environment
- Establish, evaluate and pay for a regular cleaning schedule.
- Improve Comfort
- Consider replacing old furniture
- Improve Friendliness
- Increase amount of patron-contact time for staff to provide more personal service
- Improve Safety
- Consider a security guard, or expanding the job description of an existing staff member to include such responsibilities
Outreach
- The Albany County Public Library is dedicated to having a strong presence in our communities by promoting its services throughout Albany County.
- The Albany County Public Library seeks to empower its patrons with life-long learning skills by providing proactive and professional library services to all the citizens of Albany County as well as to other constituencies.
SPECIFICS:
Increase patron participation in library decision-making
- Continue to encourage feedback
- When no feedback is forthcoming, try to come to an honest assessment of why
- Do they feel we don't listen?
- Are they uninterested?
- Is the process too complicated?
Improve Library Funding
- Objective: Improve county‘s financial situation
- Receive more money from state
- Increase proportion of county revenue
- Strategy: Educate legislators
- Objective: Improve funding from foundation
Personnel
- The Albany County Public Library values the expertise of its dedicated staff, and considers its staff to be an essential resource for accomplishing its mission.
- The Albany County Public Library values staff participation in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of all its programs and activities.
SPECIFICS:
Personnel Goals to Improve:
- Recruitment
- Development
- Compensation
- Evaluation
- Retention
Improve Staff Recruitment
- Identify and market to potential staff
- Offer better compensation (see Improve Staff Compensation)
- Attract staff who want benefitted part-time employment
- Attract staff who will stay at the library more than five years
Improve staff development
- Objective: Improve in-house training
- Objective: Improve staff access to outside training
- Improve funding for classes and conferences
- Encourage staff visits to other libraries
- Support staff in changing their roles and taking on more responsibilities
- Respect staff's work and time
- Recognize staff when they achieve something: formally and in writing
- Remove unneccessary time-consuming tasks that don't contribute to patron service
Improve staff compensation
- Objective: Secure regular inflation raises every year
- Budget realistically for compensation
- With each turnover, evaluate reducing staffing quantity to increase budget for quality
- Prioritize compensation when making budget decisions
- Objective: factor merit into compensation without alienating staff
- Reserve a portion of the budget for rewards
- Utilize local examples to justify equitable compensation
- Make salaries comparable with UW employees
- Make salaries comparable with County employees
- Create salary schedule
Improve Staff Evaluation
- Create an atmosphere of continous, positive, feedback on improvement and growth
Improve Staff Retention
- Identify why past staff has left and counter those reasons
- Improve staff development and compensation (see those goals)
Structure:
We implement the mission statement by identifying goals and objectives within those goals. The open access values are implemented throughout the library’s goals, i.e. staff is trained to treat people with respect, etc.
Goal
Goals
Tentative Schedule:
April 3: Department head return their department swot, goals, objectives, strategies
April 18: Managers review combined draft and refine, identifying priorities
May 10: Collect public comment
May 23 Board review
June 27 Board approval
July 25 Budget approval
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