 Good morning, this is Richard Miller, I'm Library Development Director here at Nebraska Library Commission and Laura Johnson who is the Continuing Education Coordinator is also here. We'll both be speaking to you today and thank you Krista for helping set this up. This is the second last workshop that we're doing actually and the only online version of the workshop that we're doing on the new accreditation guidelines and on strategic planning and that's what we'll be talking to you about today. Both of us have been on the road quite a bit. Some of them I've done by myself, some of them Laura and I have done together. This will be recorded as you know so that people can come back to it if they weren't able to get on today even though they registered. It will be archived so you can look at this at a later time. The accreditation and strategic planning workshop that we'll be doing today should allow you as a board member, as a planning group member, as a library director or a library staff member to work toward the accreditation guidelines if your library is up for accreditation this year or for reaccreditation. Even if it's not, this will be handy for you to look back at and we'll be introducing you to the other materials that we have on the website that will really help you do this process. So I'm going to start talking about the, we call them the new accreditation guidelines. They actually were used for the 2013 process and now we're going to be used for the 2014 process. Before I start, let's see if Laura would like to add anything to what I've said. Well good morning everyone. I think Richard's about covered it. We're going to try to cover accreditation and strategic planning. Our hope is that we can, when we put this up, when we archive it, that we will have some midway points where you could start to just take one little section of it if you like. So we're going to kind of do this in sections and we hope that you find it very useful. We're sure you will. All right. There are the email addresses for Richard Miller and Laura Johnson. They're very easy to use in case you need to contact us for anything. And what we hope to accomplish today are these outcomes for the workshop. You can read them yourself but basically we're going to familiarize you with the accreditation guidelines. We hope that you'll understand the connection between the accreditation guidelines and strategic planning. If you haven't gotten it by the end of the workshop, we haven't done our job so we hope you'll get it. We hope you understand that the guidelines are also useful for a number of other things including planning and we'll draw some examples for you and as benchmarks to measure your library against other libraries of similar size, either in Nebraska or elsewhere in the United States. So the new accreditation guidelines, maybe we have to take the new off there. I'm not sure because they were new last year but I guess if they're new if you haven't used them before. So that's what we'll be talking about. The new accreditation guidelines are based on community needs. I want to talk for just a little bit about the group that worked with us at the commission to put together these guidelines. It was made up of, I'm going to list their names because they did Yeoman's work on this whole thing. The group was chaired by Stan Schultz who used to be the library director at Kilgore Memorial Library in York. And the vice chair was Joan Burney who is the library director at Broken Bowl. We also had Francine Canfield from Ralston at the public library, Kendra Kasky from the public library in Ogallala, Robin Clark from the public library at the Pillion. Brenda Ely who was then director of the Southeast Library System. Amy Hafer, although she was called Greenland at that point from Hastings Public Library. Pat Leach from Lincoln City Libraries. And then the staff that worked with us here, of course Laura and I were involved in this from the very beginning as was John Felton who is our planning and data services coordinator. And then Linda Jensen and Janet Greaser and we have to give credit to Vern Bias who's our head IT guy also for putting together these guidelines. We all worked very hard on this. They were presented to and then approved by our Nebraska Library Commission, our six member gubernatorially appointed commission that governs us here. And they were in use for the first time last year. Now you guys are the lucky guys. If your library is up for accreditation this year, the reason we are doing these workshops so early is so that you have as much lead time as you need. And actually what happens here is that my office contacts your library sometime in early July around July 1st if your library is up for accreditation or re accreditation. And then you have until October the 1st to complete the accreditation guidelines and to send us your strategic plan. So that's kind of the basis of the whole thing. Now based on community need, one of the things that the group who worked with us said is that they felt that the guidelines that we used to have were not really based on and customized for individual communities and they didn't really fit a number of communities that we have. So the conclusion that was reached by that group and we concur with it from the commission here is that there has to be some planning on the local level that reflects your community needs. So that's why we have this slide up there and that's why we'll be talking to you about doing strategic planning. That's the link between these two. You really have to do strategic planning in order to do these accreditation guidelines and you'll see the links as we go through describing the accreditation guidelines. The other thing that's very different about these guidelines is that under the old guidelines for those of you who use them, you know that there were three levels, essential, enhanced, and excellent levels and you had to complete one level before you could move on to the next level and then complete the first two levels before you could move on to the third level. There were elements, there were guidelines in there that would knock a library out from moving on to the next level. With these guidelines, which are based on total points, you can make up for deficiencies in some area by earning points in some other areas. There are approximately 275 points in these guidelines and I say approximately because you can earn some extra points on some of these guidelines that might take it above 275 total points. But in the way this is structured, the three levels are bronze, silver, and gold, which we give credit to, to Laura Johnson, who came up with these three levels. Somewhat half-kiddingly, but everybody loved the idea. And with the Social Olympics coming up in less than two weeks, I think everybody understands what those levels are. The bronze is the beginning level and then the silver level is next and gold. In order to attain those levels, you see the point totals that are required, 250 for gold, 200 for silver, and 175 for bronze. Let's talk about the features of the accreditation guidelines themselves. First of all, another interesting feature and new feature about this is that instead of the old guidelines, which had somewhat arbitrary population groupings that individual libraries would have to meet based on their LSA, their library service area population, now you'll be comparing yourself with like-sized libraries with populations up to 15% larger through 15% smaller than your particular LSA, library service area population. Now when you look at, this is a picture of one of the pages from the guidelines, the very first part of it, the instructions for the whole thing, and what this does is that you can view those libraries that you are going to be compared with here. Now most of our public libraries in the state are going to be compared with other public libraries in Nebraska. Some libraries in our state do not have enough peer libraries to be compared with, and so we have in some cases pulled in public library statistics from Iowa, and in fact in some libraries in the northern tier of the state, we have pulled in some public library statistics from South Dakota as well and other states. Now in this case, we're looking at McCook Public Library, and the comparison libraries there, you'll notice there are some from Nebraska, there's Ralston and Crete and Seward, but then there are some from Iowa as well, on sitting Adele, Carlisle and so forth. And you'll notice also that instead of, one of the problems we had with the old guidelines was that if you had, let's say, population categories of 0 to 500 and 501 to 1,000 and 1,001 to 2,500, whoever it was, libraries tend not to be in the middle of those categories, they tend to be, some of them tend to be on edges, and they would make the argument about saying, you know what, we're one person over into the next largest population, we can't meet those guidelines. Well, what this peer library comparison does is that it puts your library right smack dab in the middle of the libraries that you're going to be compared with. You're right there in the middle, there should be a pretty equal number above and below your library. So that's the peer libraries. You'll notice that there was, that peer library group was a live link, you can go to this and see what it is for your particular library. And one of the things about this is, you'll notice, and we'll talk about this again later, is that each application for these accreditation guidelines is customized to your library only, not other libraries, because your statistics are fed into this, and we'll talk about that in just a second. No double reporting. For those of you who've done this before, you know that each year you send in your annual statistics, your public library survey to John Felton on our staff, and then what happened in the past was that if your library was up for accreditation or re-accreditation, sometimes you forgot what figures you reported, didn't have a record, or had a rethink that whole thing. But what happens now is that those statistics, which you know, of course, are due on February 14th, Valentine's Day, easy to remember this year, those statistics are fed into the guidelines themselves, and you don't have to report those again. There are nine guidelines which compare you with other peer libraries, I said 12-year-old David's nine, I looked it up. There are nine guidelines, and those are automatically fed in there, which you will see when you turn in your Bibliostat collect statistics using Bibliostat collect. For example, in this one you'll see that this guideline under collection 2.0502 and 2.0504 and 05 and 06 are already filled out before the others are checked. In this case, in those four areas that you see there, there'll either be a green check mark or a red X. If there's a green check mark, it means that your library has met or exceeded those of your peer libraries, so we'll take 2.0504 specifically because there are no figures listed at the one above. In 2.0504, it's talking about how much money your library spends on materials in the library as a percentage of your total operating budget. In this case, the peer average is 13.52%, and the peer median is 12.31%. This library in the Cook Public Library spends 17.2% of its operating budget on materials, so they're well above. They either have to meet or exceed either the median figure or the average figure, and they have exceeded it, so there's an automatic green check in there. Now look at the one immediately below it, 2.0505. This talks about the annual circulation. Well, the annual circulation figures from the peer libraries is 2.90 for the median and 13.05 for the average of those libraries of like size, and since this library falls below there, there's an automatic red X put into that box because it did not meet it. Remember, these are from statistics you sent in. Also remember that the ones that we're looking at here are the 2011-2012 statistics. The new statistics that you're going to be sending in by February 14th will be into the new form sometime after July 1st when you have to apply for these accreditation guidelines. So that's how it works. Some years ago, the figure that we used to have here to compare your library with was, in some cases, based on average, and we added the median figure under the old guidelines. This gives you two chances to meet that. So the other thing that these guidelines do is they offer some context help. If you look at the form itself, you'll notice that there is a question mark in a yellow ball, remember to click that time, which will take you to a help page. And in this case, this has to do with weeding, so if we click that, it actually takes you to the section of the help page, which talks about weeding. Now this help page, you can expand and print the whole thing out if you want to, or look at the whole thing if you'd like to, but this does take you to the exact section that you would want to look at. So it will answer questions, it will help with definitions in some cases. It actually will replace what we did under the old guidelines, which consisted of hundreds of emails that I used to send to libraries saying, what are you talking about in that particular thing? This explains what we're talking about. And Laura did a lot of work on this help page and we increased the visibility of the question mark in the yellow ball this year because some people didn't see it last year. The other thing that this does is that as you look at the forms itself as you're going through here, we told you that this is based on the total points. Instead of you're having to count the points up manually or to look back where you were, there's an automatic point total that occurs and this box follows you down the page as you're clicking on things. Do I click again? All right. Okay, so the points are there as you go through. So this saves you work. If you want to, you can go through this thing and you can, instead of sending the application, you can save it and resume it later. Now right now if you attempted to send in the application, you get a big red box that says it's not available for sending in right now. So you should save and receive for later. Your name of your library, the name of the library director and the email are at the end here, which is a double check to make sure we have this up-to-date information and also helps us so that we don't have to scroll up to the top and see which library we're talking about. When you save and resume later, what you put in there should be saved, of course, for later. And it does help save time. Now there are 12 minimum qualifications. One of the things that this group that we work with said to us was the old guidelines are a mixture of mandates and suggestions and hints and everything else, but they felt that there are certain minimum requirements that every library should meet before they even apply for accreditation. Those appear on the website itself and there's a link there to the 12 minimum qualifications. You have to check all 12 of these saying that you meet these and this is of course self-reported and I'll go over those in just a little bit here, but this is self-reporting that you meet all these guidelines and you're saying, you're verifying that you do that before you can move on to the application form itself. You can preview the application form, but that's not a live version of the thing. To get to the live version and to get to your libraries, you have to check all 12 of these, which I will do now. I have to go live first. Is it on the next slide or do I have to go live? No, this is how to get to the form. Alright, we're going to get to the form here. Here, just go down to all the way to the right of the browser. Here? Thank you. Okay, now we're live. Okay, on the form itself, we've been talking through a number of these things here and telling you about the things. Now we're going to go down and actually go to the 12 minimum qualifications here, which is how you get into the form. It's one of the ways to get into the form. Now we will check all 12. First of all, you're indicating that you're legally established under state statute. That means under chapter 51 for most of our libraries, but perhaps under chapter 16 or 17 if you're a larger public library, we'll check that. You say that you comply with all Nebraska library laws regulations as well as state, local, and federal laws. If the federal government gets around to changing minimum wage from the 725 or whatever it is to 1010, you'll have to be following that. It says that your library has either a governing or administrative or advisory board and that that board operates under the Open Meetings Act. And for those of you in some of our smaller libraries, make sure that you understand that you have a governing or sometimes called administrative library board. You do not have an advisory board. We have a number of libraries who think they have advisory boards that do not. So if you're unsure of that, check with us. Only in cities of the first class, which would be 5,000 population and up, do those libraries have the option of having either a governing library board or an advisory library board. And most of them have governing at this point. So you're checking that. Your board is certified. If you don't know what that means, that means that they have to have earned 20 hours within the last three years. And you can check with Laura Johnson on that if you need to be, or you don't know if you're certified, you can check with her because she handles board certification. Your library director has to be certified at the required level. And you can check with Laura on that. Would you like to talk about that now or later? Later. She'll talk to you about that. So anyway, your board and your director are both to be certified. You have to receive local funding from either your village or city or township or county depending on which area you're serving or which areas you're serving. You have to have submitted your most recent bibliostat collect statistics through Bibliostat Collect. If you have not done that, you cannot do this survey or these accreditation guidelines because those statistics are automatically fed into that. You have to pay staff and have paid staff on duty all the open hours of the library itself. Your director has to have an email address which is used regularly and you can define regularly but it certainly should be no less than probably once a week. You have to make your basic services available to all the people in your taxing area and basic services are defined in the state statutes and I wish they were more extensive than this but this was passed years ago so you have to extend services free to your tax base for circulation of materials of print and non-print materials for reference information and for information services. You have to provide internet access to anybody who walks into your library whether they're part of your tax base or not at no charge and you have to make an annual report to your governing body, your local city council, village board, county commission or township board in order to report on the state of your library each year and that's the first Monday in February of every year either your board chair which is probably preferable or the library director should be doing that. Check the state statutes under chapter 51 if you have questions about chapter 51 you can contact me I'm not an attorney but I know the library laws inside and out I'll give you the citation to the proper thing make sure that you do that you have to be able to check all of those then once you do that it says based on the responses above you meet the minimum qualifications and you may choose to apply for accreditation you hit that and then at this point you have to put in your user ID and password that you use to put in the statistics using ghibliostat collect and we are using a username and password from a cook public library so please don't cheat and try to use this because the library director there won't be happy but she has allowed us to use this and then we'll log in and get to the application form itself now you saw some pages of this before we're going to scan through this a little bit to familiarize you with the form itself we've talked about some of the features already you'll notice the floating point total in the upper right as we move up and down it follows you along to tell you how many points you've accumulated you'll notice here what I told you about if you meet some of those nine guidelines where you're compared with your peer libraries if you meet them or exceed them there's a green check mark if you don't there's a red X to get to your peer libraries you can click on that you peer libraries and get to the peer libraries and you've already seen those form a cook so we will get out of that if I close this while I get back where I was where's the back button it doesn't look live oh how do I get back oh it's the other this one okay thank you all right so you can view your peer libraries if you wish to and you can print those out and look at them and you can actually look at their statistics if you want to uh each uh item in these guidelines has a line that talks about the library goals and this is one thing that we have to hit this is another connection between your strategic plan and the library goals themselves you'll notice that for most of these guidelines as we'll see you have to indicate which part of your strategic plan addresses that guideline if there is something in your strategic plan that addresses it so not every guideline may have a citation but you'll put in something like part 2a or some shortened language from your strategic plan uh we told you about the connection to the uh help page we won't do that again you've already seen that and we told you that you can save and resume this for later on the guidelines themselves are divided into five parts we will scan through them the first part has to do with governance and planning if you check all 12 of the minimum requirements this box is already filled in here with a green X if you do not check it you wouldn't be on this page anyway if you have a strategic plan you can check this and with a strategic plan you can either give us the url if your strategic plan is on your website and we recommend that that would be a smart thing to do and a sharp thing to do so that your community knows about your strategic plan if it's not on your website you can check this box that you will send it to me Richard Miller as an attachments in an email so that we have a copy or can get a copy of your strategic plan now you noticed when I checked that box if you notice before this was at 72 points it went to 82 points on this next box if you already have a strategic plan not if you're writing one this year for your first one if you already have a strategic plan and you have reviewed it in the past you would check this box and you notice the point totals will go up to 87 and you have to indicate which of the library goals and just type x y z or something in there which of the library goals addresses the fact that you look at the strategic plan every year you would indicate the section of the strategic plan or the language from your strategic plan that indicates that if you did review and revise it you would put in there the month and the year and that would be oh something or something something dash and the two-year digits for in this case you interviewed it or you reviewed it in January 13th or 2013 so indicate that as well 1.03 is one of those sections where I mentioned to you that you might be able to get some extra points this is an area that you might be able to if you have something in your strategic plan which you may you might say in there that you review your board policies on an annual basis or at each June annual meeting of the board or whatever you want to put in there that would indicate and connect with your library goals now here is where we have I think it's 10 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 no 11, 12, 13, 14, 16 we have oh of course there are numbers okay there are 16 goal or excuse me policies listed here that you might have policies for already if you have an advocacy policy you can click that if you don't know what advocacy means you can go over to the help page and figure out what it is if you have a collection development policy which I'm sure all of you do you click that each time you click these the point total goes up by 1 now let's suppose that you don't have any others but you have a meeting policy here but you have other policies that are not listed here above you can list those here and put a check mark so you could get as many as 19 points on this one that really offsets some of the other points that you might not be able to earn on some of the other things such as local income or something else all right let's go through the rest of these if you have a technology plan you can check that if you do that you have to say which of the library goals and then the next one if you actually have reviewed your technology plan then you can check that but you have to state a state which part which goal addresses it if you've addressed it and you have to say when you've reviewed this plan this group or this library here McCook public does not have a library friends group so that's a red X and that's right out of the stats it does have a library foundation so there's a green X that's right out of the statistics that you sent in the next part of the guidelines deals with resources this is the largest portion of the guidelines themselves meaning there are more guidelines in here than any place else and we'll go through this as quickly as we can you check the box that is appropriate in this case the local income of McCook public library meets or exceeds in this case it meets the peer median so that's a green check mark if there's anything in your library goals about local income you should cite it there under facilities you report the number of annual open hours that you have take the number of hours you're open per week and take it times 52 and that's what you send into us in this case the peer median is 2600 a year the peer average is 2614 per year the Cook public library exceeds that by quite a bit and again if there's a library goal that is related to that put it there most of these you answer yourself and this of course is self-reporting I'm just gonna click a couple of these so you see how it adds the five points on there the three points on there and so forth and this probably is a good one to look at the health page because it talks about federal state and local codes for safety and access like the Americans the disabled the ADA for disabilities act and so forth under staff we're still under resources remember or we're still under resources under staff in this case there is a guideline for how much money you spend on staff and in this case the Cook public library spends less than the median or the peer average figure so that's a red X and that came from your statistics in terms of 2.0302 there is a professional level that is required of the library director you want to talk about it now let's have Laura talk about the certification of library director and certification level any librarian can join the Nebraska librarian certification program people are certified at various levels and those levels reflect their higher education so level one is a high school diploma level two is about two years of college or an associate's degree level three would be having a bachelor's degree level four would mean having a master's degree and level five is having a master's degree in library science then these levels are further qualified sometimes we put an L on the end and that means that they've had some training in library science either they've gone through the associate's the professional certificate or associate's program at the community college or they've done a bachelor's degree program at I think it's Shadron or UNO you can get a bachelor's degree in them so there we require that a library director for a library up to 2,499 people that serves that many people would have at least a high school education further everyone within the certification program needs to participate in 45 contact hours of continuing education each year and the first the certification periods are three years long and the first certification period if a person does not have that formal education in library science they need to fulfill the basic skills requirements which they can do by taking the basic skills courses that are offered by the commission so each year each three years certification period I think I might have said that wrong before each three years certification period a person needs to participate in 45 contact hours of continuing education which earns them 45 CE credit we keep track of it here at the commission when you participate in a continuing education event there's a form which you can fill out online and just hit the submit button send it into us we'll record it for you you can look at your record anytime online so you can see where you are we actually do send emails reminding people some people would say nagging but really we're just reminding you of how you're doing during your three-year certification period we really recommend that people not leave it to the last minute if you keep up with it as you go you really only have to do about an hour and a quarter each month if you did one one-hour webinar each month and went to one workshop that lasted for an afternoon each year you would have earned enough CE credits at the end of three years so that's my little commercial talk about the next one also okay we also ask that the number of staff members participating in the certification program increase as the number of people you serve increases so for libraries that serve up to 2,499 people you need only one staff member and that has to be the director at that point has to be certified if you serve more than that up to 5,000 people you need at least two staff members who are in the certification program and in good standing that they are certified up to 10,000 people three staff members need to be certified and over 10,004 staff members need to be certified so we would really like to see you participating in continuing education events which is really a substitute for saying we want you to keep up with all the changes that are going on in our library world and to keep growing in your profession so that's the deal with certification if you have any questions you can always call me thank you Laura you'll notice here that this 2.0302 and 2.0303 look a little different from most of the other guidelines these actually were pulled over from the old guidelines because there was no way that this group thought that we could well they felt it was important to have these in there but we didn't want to do a comparison with peer libraries this really just had to be this way it is the other thing I want to add is that Laura mentioned that you and Shadrin State have undergraduate programs you and Kay also has undergraduate programs but you know that as well okay so back on resources we took that little side trip because it was important for you to know that 2.0304 has to do with the number of library personnel and in this case McCook Public Library exceeds or meets the average of the median for those 2.0305 has to do with financial resources committed by and expended by the library and this again comes right out of the statistics that you send in all right technology still under resources do you have an ILS if you do you check that you get five points this actually is already automatically checked because you report this to us and the statistics also if your library catalog is on the internet 24 7 that's already reported and will be reflected in here as well the other ones have to do with broadband telephone service technology accommodations for disabled folks adequate number of libraries and that really is and here's where here's where an adequate number of computers really is defined by you in your strategic planning because we're not telling you what an adequate number of computers is but that really should be reflected in your strategic plan the next section of resources has to do with the collection I'm going to take a little bit more time with this section because this section in particular I think we'll show you how these guidelines in addition to of course having to be sent in for accreditation can be used for planning purposes in this particular case you see that we've got 2.0502 04050607 in here and all of these have to do with your library collection and you really would interpret these yourself as to what they're telling you in this case they meet the 3 percent average weeding over three years that's fine in the case of the annual expenditure of materials 2.0504 which I think I mentioned before in this case McCook exceeds that in the case of the annual circulation the next one McCook does not meet or exceed although they're close to meeting the median figure the turnover rate which has to do with basically an average of how many times a book circulates one book from your collection circulates and then the last one the collection size per capita all of those you can look at and say all right well if our annual expenditure for materials is okay we need that that's fine but if our annual circulation is below that of our peers what does that say well it might say to you that you don't have some books on the shelves that you need to have on the shelf so that you get more circulation it might say to you that you need a bigger collection because you'll notice down at 2.0507 that library collection size per capita is quite a bit lower than that of the peers maybe they need a larger collection however they're doing okay on the turnover rate on 2.0506 which means the stuff they have is going out so you can't we can't tell you what that means but by comparing yourself with your peers you might be able to draw some conclusions and then use that information when you're dealing with your funders to say you know what we really need to increase our collection size or maybe we're not weeding enough maybe we need to get rid of some of the books that are not circulating so that the the newer books and popular books can be found in the collection that those are ways that you can use these guidelines in addition to just applying for accreditation part three has to do with services this talks about 301 talks about 3.01 talks about outreach services 3.02 talks about extension services and here again 3.03, 05 and 06 are reported by you in your in your statistics that you send in in this case we cook public libraries attendance per capita at programs exceed or meets those of its peers in this case it has access to or makes available access to the databases and you reported that that we make available and it does have wireless access or Wi-Fi in the library itself and that again is reported also mentioned in this area is access to databases that go beyond those that the commission makes available to public libraries and library programs and services which you say you've segmented to apply to particular portions of your population and again put in there if you've got library goals that address those part four has to do with cooperation and collaboration I think that these are all self-reported in this section it says that your library director or a member of the board attends at least two village board meetings or city council meetings or county commissioner township board meetings per year certainly be encouraged to attend more than that because you need to be visible with those folks staff participates in community organizations and groups to keep the library visible and engaged the library has a teen advisory board the library cooperates with local entities for shared services the library board members participate in regional statewide or national advocacy efforts such as advocacy day or legislative day coming up on February 5th here in Lincoln and if you have board members that participate you get one point for each board member whose name you list there that did participate in an activity like that and the library is engaged in some resource sharing consortia such as overdrive or nabras card or pioneer consortium or whatever other sorts of consortia might be around there are some definitions here which you will want to look at in particular 4.04 seemed to confuse people last year but we did actually take out a different guideline from a different section that confuse people I think you'll understand it this year but take a look at the help page for that definition and the last part has to do with communications if you post your mission statement and your policies on the library website you could get 4 points for that if you provide interactions on your website or you do blogging or you have a Facebook or Twitter account or some other thing you could list that there and get 10 points if you use non-internet public relations and marketing tools you can get 4 points on that one if you have regular updated exhibits and displays if you offer a bulletin board if you report regularly on the library to the village board now this is in addition to that annual mandatory one that you have to do in February this would be a good idea for you to go and report to them you would hope verbally but if not get them a written statement and the example I would give and I don't think Lisa is on the phone call here from Crete today but she's the one that she got this idea from somebody else she actually did her annual report one year by getting those really large oversized Hershey's chocolate bars and having the report printed and handing it out to each member of the city council they loved it I mean they loved the report but they loved the chocolate too of course you should post those reports that you do on your website so that you keep the public informed and you should communicate regularly with those elected officials business leaders Laura said something to me the other day and she said she said that you know I think if we're going to say anything for a beginning public library and the first thing we should tell them is get to know and get along with your city clerk absolutely essential absolutely essential take them coffee cake or something in this case we've got up to 108 points I didn't check many of these of course when when Jody the library director of McCook does this she'll change these things and when I get out of here it's not going to save these things because I'm not going to save and resume I'm going to try to submit the application and see if that red thing comes up is it grinding maybe it's not doing it well the red thing is not going to come up for your viewing pleasure all right that's a pretty good review the guidelines shall we go back here now we shall go here and go back that's what we should do yeah we want to go to our may I go down to the slides thank you all right are you taking over at this point okay okay we're back to our slides now and we're going to go to the next slide and now we're going to talk about strategic planning why are we talking about strategic planning well as you see the accreditation guidelines are very much customized for your library because it's felt that your library you are probably the expert on what your community needs for your library to be doing but in order for us to accredit your library because we want to know that you know you're there doing what you're doing we need to kind of know what your strategic plan is so we've asked for you to tell us about your goals in the accreditation guidelines and to send us a copy of a strategic plan with your accreditation application so about strategic planning we knew how will you complete your library strategic plan we knew that many libraries have a strategic plan they had been planning for a long time they had a cycle where every couple of years they put together a new strategic plan and they reviewed their strategic plan every year but we knew that some libraries did not or they did a very informal kind of plan and it wasn't really written down but we're going to need something written so what is a strategic plan it needs seven elements to be a strategic plan and if you have a plan that already has these seven elements that's great you've pretty much fulfilled the requirements we have and those seven elements are first a mission statement as we've said one of the requirements is that your library's mission you can get some points in the accreditation guidelines if your mission statement is on your website and when we go and look for examples of mission statements they're there most libraries have a mission statement which is simply one or two sentences that say what the library does then we want a community profile yes I think many of you are very involved with your community and you know pretty much who lives in your community but there are always pockets that maybe we don't know because these aren't the people we see every day it's good as librarians when we have information we always want to verify it we always want to make sure that we have good sources of information and so we're asking you to verify with some statistical information about your community and tell us about your community then we want an assessment of community needs have you actually talked to people and asked them what they think the community needs are then we want an analysis of the library strengths and weaknesses and an analysis of the opportunities and threats from outside the library to the library this is that old SWAT analysis kind of broken out to make it a little easier to get your head around and it means that you've really given some real thought to what the library can do in the community and then we want an analysis of what all this means and where the library can contribute to community progress so you take those community needs you take the strengths and weaknesses of the library and you say aha the library is really good at this and the community really needs this so the library will have a goal to help the community with X whatever it is that's kind of it in a nutshell so we want specific goals and we want measurable objectives and why measurable objectives or action plans well to know how well you did to help you figure out where to do better next time to help you decide whether this was a really worthwhile program to continue or not there's lots of reasons why you want your goals to be measurable and you want to plan for evaluation which is why the goals need to be measurable so you can evaluate those are the seven elements and if your strategic plan has those you're golden you have a plan why do we want you to plan? well we want you to plan partly for these accreditation guidelines but there's lots of reasons to plan planning will actually do a lot for you it can really be a tool to make sure that you're in your library so why plan? let's go through some reasons real quick to know what direction you're headed in it's just you know to kind of have an idea okay this is what we're gonna be doing to make informed decisions because the big piece of planning is gathering information to base decisions on to allocate your resources effectively no library no library anywhere in the world that has as many resources as they could actually use and we could have some fabulous libraries if we could all just double our budgets but we can't so we have to decide where to put our resources and planning helps you do that establishing priorities in many ways that's the same thing as allocating resources since you allocate resources to the things you think are most important but sometimes things that are important don't take a lot of money sometimes things that aren't as important but they take more money but you have to establish priorities you want to prepare for changes coming in the future and one of the things that helps you prepare for changes is to really understand what the environment is now to help illustrate a need for more funding you can go to your town council and say oh we need more money and they can say yeah well join the club but if you say we want to do this for the community and that will take this kind of funding they're much more likely to say oh well that's a really worthwhile program we'll see if we can help find some of that money it's also if you were going to apply for money for resources for instance a grant grant makers don't just hand out money they want to know how you're going to spend it you have to have a plan in a grant so this will actually help you with writing grants and getting money to gain insight from the perspectives of others you know we get kind of wrapped up in what we're doing sometimes and getting an outside perspective is sometimes very illuminating to discover new ways of thinking about old problems opportunities challenges barriers sometimes things that we don't even perceive as opportunities to other people are obvious sometimes things that we understand why a library does it some a particular way someone outside doesn't and that helps us realize that we need to explain to people what we're doing well that's a good reason to plan to find alternatives we talked about grants before you can't just sit back anymore partnerships too we have to get out there and see if we can't find partners we can't find grant monies we can't find ways to convince our governing bodies to help us out to provide a more seamless transition there's going to be staff changes people change baby boomers are going to start retiring right and left so if you have a plan this leaves the people who come after you with an idea of what was going on you know probably most of us wouldn't get hit by a bus tomorrow but if we did would people know where things were what kind of programs we had coming up a plan helps them with that to make your responses to change more agile there's a wonderful quotation from actually Dwight Eisenhower and he was talking of course about planning a war in Europe but he was talking about how the most important thing about planning was the planning process and not the plan itself because of course as soon as you go into battle a plan gets blown but if you've done the planning process you now have enough background to make your changes to new situations so it's a good reason to plan finally the big deal is planning helps you make choices because you can't do it all we know there is so much going on there's new technologies coming down the pike there's new services coming down the pike I mean now we have um free gal and we have what is it Zinnio Zinnio and I mean there's this new stuff all the time and we can't do it all so what are the things that really will serve the community what does the community really need a strategic plan helps you do that it also helps you get a handle on things and figure out okay this is how we're going to handle a particular situation so there's really a lot of really good reasons to plan one of the big reasons actually that we haven't talked about is how you get by in um we happen to be doing this workshop in Columbus yesterday and Jill Owens the director there and they've gone through a very extensive planning process there Jill was saying one of the big things that she felt she'd gained through the planning process was a lot of community buy-in and community interest in what the library was doing so it's a great reason to plan okay if you're starting from scratch because we know that some of you don't have plans or if you want to start over because you've seen the planning process and you think wow we really need to get more into this we wanted to make planning possible for people um there are a lot of different books and plans out there that you can use um and we'll show you a few of them later here on these slides but we wanted to come up with something that we thought would be fairly quick but would hit the important parts of planning so we've come up with a fairly simple way to plan um we have a set of worksheets and they're on that page about on our website about accreditation and planning and we'll go to that live in a minute but the worksheets are presented in a table and there's six worksheets basically plan to plan the community profile, the community needs take stock, you develop your goals and then how you're going to evaluate and then when you filled out all six of those worksheets you put the results from that, you summarize the results from that on the strategic plan summary and that's what you send in so you just have to fill out the worksheets summarize them on the strategic plan summary and you'll have a plan now we have also because the worksheets are listed here then we actually made a video that kind of explains the deal about the worksheets all six regional system administrators and I went together and made a video it's actually one long video but we have um intervening links you can take just the section you want to look at right then and then there's some how-to guides that are a little bit more extensive about how you would do some of the things that the worksheets are asking you to do so we can again go to that because at the public library accreditation um page is this the oops that's the login and I do need to go this is the page see I'll show you and we just want to scroll down this is a kind of a long page actually but see it's right here on the page there are links to all these worksheets now we actually made a decision that each worksheet would be just a plain word document so the deal is to open the worksheet let's see I'm opening it and then save it to your computer and then you can use it you can move things around you know it doesn't have to you don't have to fit into the box for heaven's sake you can make those boxes maker if you want the first worksheet is plan to plan because well a project really isn't a project until you have deadlines and you have somebody assigned to do it that's just you know and it's easy to get things put off it's easy to get things well hey I don't want to do it you do it you know so you need to assign people and you need to kind of decide these are the steps we're going to take and this is when we're going to get them done and right now you have well let me see February March April May June July probably you want to be about done with this in July or August so that's like six seven months to go that's enough time but you need to get started um then we want to go back this is going to be very tricky here because I'm going to keep going back and forth what are you going to do there you go oh no I didn't want to go to the power but I wanted to go to the page live oh well still there yeah okay see we're back to the live page again that was worksheet number one where you plan to plan and we have stuff on the how to guides about why plan and a little bit about the planning team um this is a how to guide you don't have to fill this out this is just for your um information but we really recommend that a planning team be about five to twelve people that you have at least a representative of the staff a representative of the board if not the whole board and some community stakeholders why do you want to mix it up like this and not have it just be the board or you know just the director sitting in her office well because you need viewpoints from more than one person and you need more people to do the work um so we really recommend this as far as having a group and that group really needs to be a team and that team you might want to really think about consensus and the idea that when you do something you want what they call a mutually acceptable resolution which means that not everybody agrees with something but everybody can live with it it means that everybody on the team has to speak up they don't have to be mean but they do have to say what they really think and they have to be willing to say okay well I don't love that but I can live with it and that's kind of how you reach consensus it would be nice if we could teach that to our congress and well it would anyway this is about the planning team and that's important enough to give a little thought to because it's going to make a real difference in your planning if you have people that can work together and really the thing that makes people work together most is to agree on a goal and if their goal is to come up with a plan by a certain time you'll get people really working together okay back to worksheet number two the community profile this I think is the most formidable worksheet to fill out although it's not really that hard when you come right down to it what we're asking you for is some demographic information and you can get demographic information from the census from the American Fact Finder so we're going to get very tricky and use the link there to go to the American Fact Finder this is the interface that the U.S. Census Bureau has spent mucho bucks on to try to get a good interface so that people can use their information because their information is extensive so you just put in the name of your town if we're using McCook today see it doesn't leave it to chance you just put in McCook and it'll give you a list of all the McCooks and you get to pick one we pick McCook City, Nebraska and go and it lists then here's McCook they say they have 7,698 people this is according to the 2010 census now a complete census is done every 10 years it's mandated by the Constitution it's been done every 10 years since 1790 but then in between they do what they call the American Community Survey which is a sampling statistically that sampling is really quite accurate although when you get to very, very small groups of people it becomes a little less solid it's still very usable information but it lists the tables here there's many more tables but these are the popular ones and the first one is the general population and if we look at this we can see that here's all the people in McCook listed by groups of 5 in their age groups and telling what the percent of people in the town are in those age groups now you know what the biggest the fastest growing group of people in the US is it's people 85 years and older very old people that group is getting bigger and bigger the boomers haven't quite got there yet so there's going to be an explosion soon they're working on it but why does this matter, why would it matter how old the people in your town are well the reading interests of people under 5 are really quite different than the reading interests of people in mature years and this means a lot in terms of your collection it means a lot in terms of your programming it may need a great deal in terms of your services for instance if you have a if this group is really big and getting bigger that may mean outreach to people that may be home delivery to things where people are home bound anymore it may mean that you really need to make sure that any assisted living or nursing home in your town has some services that you need to be sure that you can recommend the talking book service to people who would enjoy reading but are having difficulty with it your small population under 5 years this means that you may want to be but if this is growing or you really have a lot of people in this cohort you may want to do a lot more story times you have a lot of teens well that how's your teen advisory board doing how is your teen area in your library you have people in this 20 to 24 year bracket but you're not seeing them come in the library well maybe that means some programming for young adults so we know that reading interests are really different for people in different age groups generally and so we want to know how old are people we also kind of need to know probably not race so much as there's a thing in one of these tables yeah yeah so we go back to a different and here's your demographic and housing estimates here's your demographic characteristics then we can talk about say if we ask for education educational attainment because we know that for instance people with higher educational attainment tend to read more so we ask for that kind of information and that's so look I find these tables fascinating I could spend a lot of time with this I think there's really a lot of information to be mined out of this out of this but take a look and that's why we put together the worksheet we ask you to fill out these things now this doesn't mean that these are the only things you have to fill out if you have more information about your community if you want some more information you can certainly include that in your community profile and we'd love to see you put together a really rich community profile one of the things that you find when you look online and you just google community profiles and you'll find them all over the place but it's very interesting the ones that are put together by the parks and rec department are very different than the ones that are put together by the department of transportation where they're interested in commuting patterns and they're very different than the ones put together by the economic development people so if you took all of these and put them together and had one big community profile you would have a very rich picture of your community and maybe this is something that your library would want to consider doing is being kind of a keeper of community information one of the things I like to suggest to people is that you get a file folder a plain old low-tech file folder and you put it in your desk and every time you see something about your community clip it out or make a copy of it and put it in your file folder if a church bulletin says how many members there are in the congregation save that if an article in the paper says how many kids played little league football or baseball I guess there isn't really little league football little league baseball put that in your file folder yes try to get the sources of the information along with the information so that when you go back to it later and you might want to update it or get further information you'll be able to do that but if you keep gathering information just when you see it you'll have a lot of good stuff there that you can put in your profile that really tells you a lot about your community and what your community needs that great area sure okay now when we ask you to describe the library in your schools this is something that you're going to have to do you can't just look this up in the American fact finder you kind of need to take a look at your library in your school and say oh yes it's a really good school library or it's a school library that's using accelerated reading or it's a library that is used a lot for study halls so the kids may not really be looking at the books as much as they might you don't know so I would really recommend and it's good to have a good working relationship with the school librarian so you're going to have to kind of look at that the higher education institutions well any more with extension services it's pretty much everybody in America isn't it but if you have a number of people in your community taking community college courses and doing it online they may need some library assistance and you have to figure out well do you need to serve these people and how can you best serve these people so kind of look at that then we ask about language spoken at home now we can ask about ethnic background but really isn't language spoken at home for us a better indicator of the kinds of needs people are going to have if they speak excuse me if they speak Spanish at home then maybe you're going to need some Spanish language materials or you're going to need materials about English as a second language for those people who are trying to learn English then work life why would we ask about families where both parents of children under six years old are in the labor force well because those kids are in day care so does that affect when story times are it just might it may really mean that you need to do things in the evening or that you need to take story times out to the day care providers it's a real indication of how to provide services how much poverty and how much unemployment you have that again helps you determine do you really need to get into e-government and be able to help people fill out their unemployment insurance applications online if they're below the poverty line do you need to help them fill out some other kinds of online forms so the real indicators these figures yes just numbers but there are indicators of where people are in their lives and then how you can help them oh does it okay okay next page okay and your economic characteristics if you know who the big employers are in town sometimes that's important if you have a lot of engineers in your town you might need slightly different materials than if you have a lot of salesmen if you have engineers and salesmen well the world's their oyster and some of the cultural characteristics of the community what are the recreational facilities available what kind of clubs do you have and this helps because you can develop partnerships what are your community's means for public communication do you usually would putting an article in the newspaper reach everyone in town do you have a radio station is your facebook page really active or do you have a facebook page and would that be worthwhile in your community will a lot of people see your facebook page these are the kinds of things that you really want to think about and gather this information so that you kind of know which way you want to go again this idea of planning helps you figure out which way to head okay so we go back to our page that was worksheet number two and that may be one of the more complicated worksheets but really worthwhile in terms of putting together a lot of information then worksheet three is about assessing the community needs this means going out and asking people and there are several ways to do it and we ask you just to let us know how you did it and when what methods you used and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute but this is a worksheet to kind of record what you were doing make notes as you go so that you don't forget the how to guide for this I think is pretty good in terms of there's two of them how to assess community needs and then this running a focus group and I'm going to click on this for just a second because focus groups are one of the ways that you really may use and there's some pretty good directions here on how to do this if you've never done it because there is a way to do it that will make it more successful for you and there are some references if you want to go further we have some these were very good I thought on the internet to explain how to do this okay the assess community needs okay there are a number of different methods the one I think everybody thinks about is surveys and yes survey monkey has made that very easy but if that's a computerized survey you're only going to reach certain segments of your population there are going to be some people that you are not going to reach with a survey surveys are also a little bit tricky in that you have to be really careful about how you write the questions it's sort of a rule of thumb that if it is possible in any way to misinterpret a question they will so you have to test your questions make sure that you know talk to your best friends and ask them what they think of your questions if you're going to do a survey a survey is a good way to reach a lot of people for instance we had one person in one of our workshops say that she could include her surveys in the utility bills for her community if she stuffed all the envelopes well you know it takes your time but it didn't actually take cash and she got a really good return rate so if that's something that's possible good but surveys are tricky and they if you use any one of these methods actually you probably need to use another method too you don't rely on just one method but there are surveys links here to other things on how to do surveys that this conducting needs assessment surveys is really very good focus groups are another good way we have a whole thing on how to do focus groups this is something that I think is really possible for you so I would kind of encourage you maybe to try this you get a small number of people 6 to 12 people get together and it's kind of interview it's kind of a group interview the trick for a moderator is to get everybody to talk to not let any one person really dominate the conversation and to select people that have some differences but probably don't have conflicts so that you get a conversation and not a fight also that people for instance teenagers and community leaders in the same focus group the community leaders might really intimidate the teens whereas if you get a bunch of teens together they'll really talk so you kind of have to think a lot about how you're going to choose the members of your focus group but it's a good way to talk to people if there are community meetings any community meeting the Kiwanis Club the Chamber of Commerce the Optimists the Church Altered Guild the Garden Club and very often these clubs are really looking for somebody to do a program so you can come and do a program and ask people what they think the community needs are and we really want to emphasize that we want to ask about community needs not what people think of the library for one thing many, many people most people are so nice and they'll tell you what they think you want to hear and that is really what you want here you want to know what does the community really need so if you're asking people about if we had big community projects in the next five years what do you think are the most important ones we should do first what things would you really like to do what kinds of activities would you like to participate in that you've never tried before what do you think your kids like to do where would they like to hang out what kind of hang out would they like to have really think of a bunch of questions to ask people and try to get a conversation going in these meetings about these things so that you get an idea of what the community members really think are needed it's a good trick if you can to record this stuff record the conversation if you can't record the conversation it's also good to take someone with you to take notes so that you really have a pretty good record of what went on then you can use nominal groups or you can use key informant interviews and this is essentially with key informant interviews talking to people who you think are pretty savvy who know what's going on in the community so for instance if you have a church you probably wouldn't want to talk to the minister you would want to talk to one of the people of the congregation you want to talk to a couple of business people who seem to be very involved with community affairs you want to talk to a couple of people who are just people who have jobs in the community but they have a large group of people that they interact with so that you kind of get a representative view and you can't do just one form an interview you need to do half a dozen at least and we'd love to see you do a dozen but these are ways to find out what the community needs and what do you do with that once you found all that out well you just put it on the worksheet oh this is how to put the community needs and again you let us know who you interviewed when you had a focus group survey you did oh an observation is another thing now you probably are pretty observant and you have seen things in your community so you know about what some of the needs are but do you always go to the same grocery store maybe you need to try a different store and get a different viewpoint maybe you need to actually drive up and down some streets look at the houses are they well kept or do they need paint are there a lot of people sitting in sitting around or does everybody seem to be busy and doing something are they all engaged and work during the day so you can actually find out a lot about your community just by observing but try to make your observation a little bit more systematic and a little bit more what we say objective than you perhaps would in your daily life pretend you just arrived in town yeah that's a good thing pretend you just arrived in town oh real estate people talk to real estate people they usually have a pretty good viewpoint of what's going on then we ask you to take stock after you've looked at the community you've kind of thought about what the community needs are look at the library what are your strengths and what are your weaknesses now this is the old SWAT analysis that a lot of you might be familiar with but we've kind of broken it down to make it a little easier to organize your thoughts so for instance your strengths and weaknesses your human resources your strengths are that you have a great staff that have been there a long time they really understand how the flow of work goes in the library they're really good at customer service but they don't speak Spanish and that's a weakness because you could really use some Spanish sometimes your facilities you have a great building your carpeting is pretty new you don't have any shelves that are more than six feet tall you have a nice meeting room but your air conditioners on the fritz and that's a weakness so see what I mean and you don't always have to have the same number of strengths or weaknesses but try to really take an objective view of your library and say okay this is our technology we have these new computers and we got all this great equipment but we need to learn a little bit more about using the e-government resources to help people we have a really good collection but we have a group of older gentlemen who have really indicated an interest in westerns and true adventure and we need to beef that up in our collection you know really take a look at it what do you need what's good what's not so good and then your external environment so you've looked at the library itself then look at the things that are really going to affect the library from outside your opportunities and your threats the economy, the opportunities they're building a new plant and that's going to be great there's going to be new people coming to town the threats well there's some infrastructure on main street that really needs fixing the technology yeah you've gotten this great broadband but the threats well the phone company isn't doing so well you know there's opportunities and threats and these are things from outside the library that are going to affect the library because the environment we work in really affects us okay now you've taken your community profile you've taken the community needs you've taken stock of the library let's talk just for a second about mission what let's not we'll talk about that in a minute okay but mission statement comes in at this point you develop goals and objectives see you write down okay these I've looked at all the community needs and now I'm going to and listed them and kind of ranked them and said okay these are the community needs and the ones that the library really can help deal with and sometimes these are surprising for instance we really having a problem with the town dump too much stuff is getting put in the dump and we really need to emphasize recycling well what can the library do about that you're not going to collect garbage that's not your thing but you could put together a whole list of information about recycling you could show people where there are recycling facilities you could have a list for people um you could have a program on what are some of the things that people can do with recycled materials and how builders and people who are remodeling their houses can really look at recycled materials and how to recycle the materials they're getting rid of so that's a goal you a community need that you could actually address if you decide that's important but take your community needs we have three listed here I probably wouldn't say oh no more than five you know from three to five is a good number then your goal you write a goal and then objectives and we'll talk about writing goals and objectives in a little while um for each one of these community needs we go back that was worksheet five and this is we have some helps here about setting priorities we talk about that how you would set priorities how you identify your options and then you choose the ones that you think are the most important or the ones that you can really help with and then we kind of talk about project management executing the plan a little and you can read that if you want worksheet six is how you're going to evaluate once you put together your goals objectives how are you going to measure whether you were successful or not and it's not just the matter of whether you were successful it's a matter of did one thing work better than another to achieve the goal was this something that would be worthwhile to repeat um was this something that took a whole lot more time and money that you thought it was going to and maybe you just can't do it again so you really want to be able to evaluate how you've done so that you set up your cycle of planning for the next time then we get to the strategic plan summary and you kind of summarize on this what what you did and all these other worksheets and this again is a word document so you would open this up save it to your computer and use as much room as you'd like to we have some samples here that Richard will talk about in a little while and we have one that's oh goodness it's 22 pages long um and that's probably kind of long for many of these things we have another one that's about five pages long maybe that's a little on the short side um but didn't you hate it when you had assignments in school and you ask them how long does it have to be and they said long enough to cover the subject but that's the deal here this kind of needs to be long enough to cover the subject and you will have some of these worksheets for instance with your demographic information there will be several pages that you are turning in we don't need to see the worksheets we just need the summary of what you found on each worksheet so that in a nutshell is the planning process this isn't as fancy as many planning processes but we think this will get you to having a workable plan something that really will you can use in your community and that's all we were trying to do so now we're still live on our page on our website let's go back to our slides back here PowerPoint and you see this and we'll go to the next page we want to talk a little bit about other sources of community information remember we talked about looking at the American fact finder but your city or county planning department may have already done some community surveys and some community needs assessments they may have done a community profile so make sure you check with them because you don't have to reinvent the wheel your observation is worthwhile so include that the schools may have some information so really check around with people and if they have information you can include their information in your worksheet or in your planning process we do have a list on the Nebraska library commission's website in the Nebraska access section where we have a list of recommended websites the page is called where can I find statistics about Nebraska counties and towns and here is the see here's the page they have a lot of different places that you can go to find statistics yes they were selected by librarians you betcha okay so let's go back to our power point now how do you find out about the community needs and wants we kind of went through this but I wanted to emphasize there are several ways you probably want to choose more than one way and really it kind of comes down to there are focus groups which is a group interview key informant interviews which is interviews with people who kind of know what's going on in their in their area the community forums where you talk to people who are already meeting groups and clubs that kind of thing observation where you walk around town and look and see and surveys where you send out a list of questions and ask people to answer them and the whole deal with community needs and wants is that you're going to see a lot of them and that's okay but you're going to choose the ones that the library really is uniquely qualified to address and you do need to be a little bit imaginative about how you address needs and you may not be able to solve a whole problem but you may be able to make a real contribution to the solving of the problem so really think about that when you look at the community needs and you decide which ones that you need to address in your library oops sorry okay we've also talked about putting together goals and objectives and I want to talk a little bit about objectives they say that objectives should be smart well okay somebody put together an acronym but nevertheless it's a good thing it's a good way to remember that you want your objectives to be pretty specific you want them to be measurable so that you can tell okay how did we do you want them to be attainable in other words we have to deal in you have to be able to do it they do not have to be easy I would think that probably you want a combination some easy some not so easy maybe even one or two hard but that's okay because you don't stretch yourself and you don't really achieve if you don't set out to achieve so make them attainable but they don't all have to be you know dead easy realistic you know chances are no matter how many lottery tickets you buy you're just not going to win you know we do have to deal with the real world and timely you do want them to be able to be accomplished within the time you have and you do want a deadline date on things because as we've said nothing is not a project until someone is signed to do it and they have a deadline we've talked about goals and objectives goals are broad statements of kind of something you want to achieve objectives are how you're going to achieve it so objectives are narrow and precise for instance if you have a goal this is one of the community needs that you have unemployed community members so your goal is to assist the unemployed community members and you're going to do this by helping them to improve their job seeking skills and by publicizing job opportunities for them that's a goal then your objectives would be okay we're going to do these specific things we're going to continue to compile and update a weekly list of job opportunity sources so this has a deadline every week it's also okay if one of your objectives is to continue to do something that you haven't done before or that you have done before we'd like to see you do some new things too but you can continue to do old things if they were good things then another objective would be to offer programs on upgrading skills at least once a month so there's another time every month you need to offer a program on upgrading skills and we're kind of specific about the kinds of skills we're talking about then another objective is to have a partnership with your chamber of commerce and hold a job training fair and this job training fair is going to have at least 12 prospective employers or people who offer job training and you're going to do it in February so that's a date and you're going to do it for upcoming graduates to your people from your high school and your unemployed people so that's really very specific and it's going to be a big job but those are objectives those are things that you're going to be able to measure that you're going to be able to say yes we did it by the deadline date and you're going to be able to say and this is how many jobs how many jobs we listed, how many places we checked with to find the jobs that we listed the programs how many people how many people attended the programs how many people rated the programs as useful how many people you followed up with who then were able to write a good resume that kind of thing are your objectives now remember we talked a little bit about mission statement and we said the mission statement kind of fits in when you're taking stock of your library but it also kind of fits in at the beginning because you want to know what it is that your what your job really is what you really are doing and it kind of fits in at the end so in other words you need a mission statement all along and a mission statement really one or two sentences that say what your library does and this is almost more an internal document than an external document although we would expect you to put it on your web page because you want to keep in mind because it is true when you are up to your neck in alligators it's hard to remember that the objective was to drain the swamp so you really want the mission statement so you can always keep in mind that this is what you do and these are the things that a good mission statement is I have a couple of examples for you here this is the New York Public Library I think this is really good of course they probably got the best advertising copywriters in the world they were told to write it for them but or maybe they didn't I don't know they may have had a staff contest to write them I really I don't know but isn't this what a public library does to inspire lifelong learning advance knowledge, strengthen the community I think that's great here's one from Oakland Public Library here in Nebraska to provide quality materials fulfill the educational, informational cultural and recreational needs and they want to say in an atmosphere that's welcoming, respectful and professional wow I think that's pretty cool again that's one sentence and that's all you need take a look Google it if you Google Nebraska Public Library Mission Statement you will find a whole bunch of examples take a look at them if there are terms you like the way they say things that you like borrow them and you can come up with your own mission statement that you think really describes what your library does and keep that in mind because sometimes you just need to remind yourself okay and now evaluation, why do we evaluate what are we doing here you think why evaluate the program, it's over well you might want to do it again and it's also amazing when you're in the middle of a project it kind of sparks off new ideas so you get ideas for the next planning cycle you see how you did, just because you want to know how you did you develop priorities and works better than another maybe you'll do more of that and less of the other and you find improvements for next time so that you keep growing and that's why we want you to evaluate so have we got planning down now strategic planning does come in various shapes and sizes they all do have some basic steps which we have tried to include in those worksheets but there are other things you could use the clip plan which about 20 years ago now the commission had commissioned they had it written for the libraries in Nebraska to use it's really very good it gives a lot of good advice, you might want to look at it even if you don't follow all of the things they say but it's maybe maybe a little bit more extensive than our quick plan here the new planning for results from Sandra Nelson it's amazing but she makes a banquet out of planning and she does a if you followed her you would have a fabulous plan when you were done but we were kind of going through more for a drive through window approach and we just we need to get it done in a way that still works for people we also we do have an example here of the five-year plan that the Nebraska Library commission itself does fill out we are required to do this by the Institute of Museum and Library Services from whom all federal funds flow and so we too do do our planning we have goals and objectives ours has to be done in a slightly different way because of their requirements but still you know we do one so what we want to know now okay Richard wants to tell some stories he has some great illustrations here you can't leave without hearing some stories and Laura mentioned yesterday that we were at Columbus Public Library and Jill the Library director was talking about their strategic planning that they did but we have used what happened in Columbus as an example of how you can distinguish between community needs and library responses because you'll notice that when she was running you through the SWOT analysis the strength and weaknesses and opportunities and threats she said strengths and weaknesses are for consideration of the library they are internal when you look at the opportunities and threats you look external to the library that's a handy distinction because there tends to be a messing of those up if you don't sort of distinguish between internal and external but what happened in Columbus some years ago is that they were having a problem and Jill verified this yesterday they were having a problem with teens and tweens because there's a middle school about two blocks away from the library itself and a lot of those kids as is true a lot of our communities were at loose ends after school and before their parents came home I don't know if you call them latchkey kids or whatever you call them but basically they had no place to go or no place that they were interested in going so two of the places that they gathered were a burger joint across the street from the public library and in front of the public library itself and what they were doing was being teens and tweens they were very active they were kind of pushing and shoving there's gravel rocks of fairly large size in front of the library they was worried about they'd start throwing it at each other break a window or whatever and right next door to the public library there's a senior center and the seniors many of them are ambulatory and so they'd come over to the library they were afraid to come into the library they were afraid that they'd get knocked over and I think that was a very real threat so the community itself knew that it had a problem this wasn't just the library's problem or the burger joint's problem this was a community problem but the library decided to try to do something about that and what they did was they formed a young adult advisory group which they hadn't had before working with their young adult librarian they moved some shelving of the second floor of the library elsewhere and created a teen space in the library itself they bought teen friendly furniture and worked with this advisory group to come up with things that the kids would like they let the kids paint the area themselves it's wild believe me it's very different looking and what happened was as Jill verified yesterday they don't have that problem anymore neither does the burger joint across the street the teens have a place to go that they themselves had an opportunity to have input on and they felt valued now here's an example of the library happened to respond but they actually helped the community as a whole solve a community need it wasn't just the library need now they happened to get perhaps more opportunity to meet and work with teens which is a benefit that the library got but that wasn't the basis for doing this whole thing it was to address a community need they also have added a monitor position the community gave them additional money to have a monitor there between the end of the school day excuse me and the time the kids go and are picked up by their parents and so they actually got some additional staff the staff does not do any library programming the staff is just there to monitor the situation and it helped address a community need and the other story that I've been telling to people is a little bit more you might think it's far-fetched but it is a true story and that has to do with rat poison in St. Louis years ago when I was working at the Missouri State Library and for those of you who went to an NLA conference last year you may have heard the story already when I was working with the Missouri State Library years ago I heard a story that was a true story about people within the city of St. Louis who were having problems with rats in the town and for those of you who know St. Louis it's right along the river it's a very urban area there are some parts of the city that are in very good shape and so forth and they were starting to have a rat problem and were concerned about it from a health perspective well they wanted to distribute rat poison to people to use in their areas where they lived but they wanted to distribute it to people and the city offices that would have distributed would have distributed it closed at 5 o'clock and most people worked till 5 o'clock well they worked it out that the public library branches in St. Louis and I think there are about 13 or so of them perhaps more would actually become the distribution points for that rat poison for distribution to the public because they're open weekends they're open evenings when the city offices were not open so there's a situation where you don't consider that obviously something that the library might consider to do but it actually was addressing a community need now Laura showed you a slide earlier on and the reason and she hit this very heavily so you should have gotten the message the reason that we want you to look at statistics about communities to talk to people about communities to get outside the library to talk to other people to make observations as if you haven't lived in that community for a year on the number of decades whatever it is is because you need to try to look at the community with fresh eyes our expectation is that when you look at those statistics on American Fact Finder or you talk to people who are new to town or you talk to non-users of your library or you talk to people from a different cultural background that you're going to find out stuff you didn't know if you listen and look with an open mind and if you do that then by doing that as a part from considering whether we have the resources in the library to address that if you consider it apart from it and you look with new eyes with fresh eyes at what your community needs are even if you think you already know your community take a look at it again then you can come back board members, planning group members people from outside you can work with them and say now what is our library in a unique position to address of those needs there is a on worksheet 3 there is can we go back to worksheet 3 for just a minute can we still do that or we still want go to the next one over to the left just go to the left one oh yeah oh worksheet 3 ok if you go down to the second page of that you'll notice on that page on the second page of worksheet 3 that what we are recommending that you do when you're looking around to figure out what community needs are that you actually keep a tally of those needs and as you go through there you say oh 10 people mentioned that the houses in town aren't kept up by people 8 people mentioned that there are dogs wandering around town 6 people mentioned that the streets are pothold whatever it is you put all the needs on a chart and you start tallying behind it and those that come up with the most tally marks you put number 1 and the next most number 2, number 3, number 4 and then when you're working with your planning group you say ok these are needs that we have identified in our community and the people in this community have identified now which of these might we want to address and here's one last story some years ago I was working at Southeast Library System as the system administrator there before I came here to the Nebraska Library Commission and I did a strategic planning process with a very small town that town wanted to either build a new library or add on to the library that they had so we did a SWAT analysis of the community and what they came up with they said the greatest need that this community has identified is for meeting place we have no place in town where we can hold meetings zip, the library wasn't big enough nor the place in town was available for meetings so they decided this was their number 1 priority as they were planning their new building they worked with an architect they worked with some planners they were given a price tag associated with that new library or renovated library and they found out that they didn't have as much money or they have to raise more money than they thought to do it so I worked with them again I said alright what are you going to do to address this this gap, this need that you have because you can't get enough money to do what you want to do and the first thing that they decided to do was to eliminate the meeting room from their planned library and I waited for just a minute and I looked at them and I said wait a minute what did you identify as the number 1 need in your community a place for meeting I said well why on earth then would you cut that out first thing in your plan that's the kind of disconnect that people make if they don't say okay here are the needs here's what we're in a unique position to address here's how we're going to do it here are our plans what's our mission statement all those sorts of things together that would prevent your making a decision like that which was really not a very bright decision that that was silly given the fact that they had already determined that that's the greatest need in the community that connection between needs in the community that you identify and responses on the part of the public library is what strategic planning is all about because the word strategic has within it the word strategy you're developing a strategy you're coming up with a plan that will actually deliver the biggest bang for the buck that you're doing the public bucks to do this so you better be really good at doing your planning and making your decision and thinking strategically and that's what we're talking to you about today and I'll give it back to Laura now okay now finally we want to ask you okay has this program achieved the goals we had for remember at the beginning of the program Richard talked about what our goals were what we wanted and so are you more familiar now with the new accreditation guidelines than you were before you know where they are on our website so you can take a look at them but you kind of run through them now you have sort of an idea of how they look do you understand how the guidelines and the strategic plan relates how the guidelines are really based on the idea of are you doing in your community what you think your community needs do you understand how you can use the guidelines for planning because the guidelines show what's going on in your community and do you understand how the guidelines can be used as benchmarks because the guidelines use a comparison with peer libraries to determine whether you're meeting goals or not so those are the questions that we'd really like to know so let us know you know send us an email or put something right now in the questions we'd really like to know if this was useful to you or not and if you have further questions please let us know that we really want you to be able to have a successful experience with this planning and we would love to see you all get accredited I want a lot of gold libraries we're all going for the gold here the other thing to mention to you is that each of your system administrators and each of the six systems is more than willing to work with you on these strategic plans and we are more than willing think of those people because they are really revved up to do this they helped with all this planning they helped do the videos they helped do the presentations and so forth and Laura and I are here today but they know as much about this as we do and they're more than happy to talk to you about it so give them a call if you don't know which system you're in let us know, we'll tell you thank you so do we have any questions or anything not right this minute if you have any questions type it into the questions section of your go-to web on our interface and Richard and Laura can answer it, not me okay no there wasn't anything that came in during the webinar during the workshop either paying attention, learning either that or they're stunned we will put a couple more things up on the website one of the things is that last year we had strategic plans that were submitted and probably the best one was from the Shelby Community Library in Shelby, Nebraska we'll put that up on the website you will see that they basically followed all those steps you'll see that they followed all those guidelines they have a wonderful section that talks about the people that they involved in their planning committee it's really good, take a look at it it's not feasible for us to do a verbal description of it but we will have it up on our website from Shelby Community Library no we just have a comment Wanda says it has helped me understand how to go about our accreditation so I guess one of those questions was yes, one of those questions thank you Wanda, glad to hear it makes it a success anything else so thank you everyone thank you, take care