Assess, Reassess, Repeat

​Happy New Year! I’m actually not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions (really, who is?). However, I am always a fan of setting goals, and you can do that pretty much any time of the year—not just when the New Year rolls around.
Ideally, assessing your past year and setting goals for the following year should be done shortly before your fiscal year ends—giving you enough time to advocate for budget changes that may need to happen in order to meet your goals—but that doesn’t always happen, and that’s okay! Last year I set a few goals upon staff evaluation results in June, and my youth services department staff and I set our latest goals in September, a few months into the fiscal year and after we debriefed over our Summer Reading Program.
In advance of our department meeting, I determined that we would set goals for the following areas: programs, collections, and professional development. We used summer reading survey data, patron feedback, program attendance, and our own experiences to create the following goals:

• Provide programs that are inclusive of working parents.
• Provide programs to teens that they will respond to and attend.
• Improve communication with schools, preschools, and daycares.
• Make collection organization more patron-friendly.
• Take advantage of professional development opportunities that build on our strengths and strengthen our weaker areas.

Of course goals don’t mean much without action steps. Our action steps included providing an evening storytime, starting a teen art program, and creating a “Helpful Hints” handouts for classes that regularly visit our library. Remember to plan action steps that can be reasonably completed during the year while still pushing you and your staff a little outside of your normal comfort zone.
For more ideas on areas you might consider covering when setting goals, take a look at the OLA Youth Services Guidelines (remember that CSD is surveying members about new guidelines), the Edge Initiative, and the National Impact of Library Public Programs Assessment.
And last but not least, one of the most useful mantras I heard at the 2015 OLA Conference was, “think big, start small, act fast.” Use that to your goal-setting advantage when you’re attending conferences, participating in meetings, and sitting through webinars.

Written by MacKenzie Ross