 Hello, my name is Richard Miller. I'm Library Development Director at Nebraska Library Commission. Today we're producing a brief video for your information concerning a planning process that we are going to be doing some training on and how that planning relates to the new accreditation guidelines. That's what this video is going to be about. We're entitling it planning for libraries and introduction to the 2013 accreditation guidelines for Nebraska Public Libraries. I'm going to tell you a bit about those guidelines, but I want to talk to you first about the importance of being accredited as a public library. For those of you which are already accredited, you know about the importance because you can use it for getting increased funding from the commission. You can use it because then you're able to apply for grants such as the CDBG grants and the USDA grants, as well as grants through the Nebraska Community Foundation. So there are important issues, but most importantly, I think locally it's important for you to have pride in your library and to share that with your elected officials. The new guidelines for 2013, this will be the first year that we're using these guidelines. So those of you who are doing accreditation this year will be our guinea pigs, we'll see how it works, we'll modify it if need be. But the thing that we wish to point out to you is the importance of doing local planning, strategic planning for your library. That's the basis of these guidelines, as you'll see as we review them here. Let me go through a few points with you here. The new accreditation guidelines require a library to have a plan. I've already said that three times, I think. Some Nebraska Public Libraries are not in the habit of planning. I'm sure you're not a moment, but if you are, this is an opportunity for you. And what we'll be doing is for this series of videos that we're going to be doing, which this is the first, we're going to be working with the systems to do workshops throughout Nebraska. We're going to be planning worksheets for libraries to make this planning process as simple, straightforward, and step-by-step as possible. We're going to be producing short videos to introduce planning steps to you, and those videos can be used at individual workshops or for work with individual boards or groups of meetings. So, why plan? Well, we ask ourselves this question all the time, because planning is kind of a pain in the butt, but it is a necessary pain in the butt, because if you don't plan, you don't know where you're going. So, what we're going to do is that the sections that we're going to do for the videos and for the planning workshops that we're going to be doing will cover the following areas, and I put them down at shorthand here. Why plan? A plan to plan. Before you do the planning, you have to set out a plan as to how you're going to do it. We'll talk about community profiles so that you understand what the needs are in your community, and then community needs as well. We'll be taking stock, that is, you'll be doing things such as determining your strengths or weaknesses or opportunities and threats. We'll be setting priorities and developing goals and talking to you about how to do those. Then executing the plan and the final step of any good plan is, of course, to close the circle and do an evaluation of those plans themselves. Now, I wanted to take a little time to talk to you about the current accreditation guidelines and the new accreditation guidelines, which will begin in 2013. Since 2011, some of us on the staff here, including Laura Johnson and John Felton and myself, have labored over this with a group of people from throughout the state, and I've listed the members of the accreditation committee here. Joan Burney and Stan Schultz were the co-chairs. Francine Canfield, Kendra Kasky, Robin Clark, Brenda Ealy, Amy Greedlin, Pat Leach, and I've already mentioned John, Laura, and myself. The guidelines themselves are really quite different from the current accreditation guidelines. For those of you who have been through the accreditation process, you know that there are three levels of accreditation, essential, enhanced, and excellent. And we have modified that quite a bit. When you see the guidelines themselves, which will be up on our website as soon as they are approved by our commissioners at their May meeting, we hope, you'll see that they are quite a bit different from the current guidelines. Here are some of the features of the new guidelines. There are 12 minimum qualifications before a library can even apply for accreditation. Now, we did this because we had kind of a mixture of things in the old guidelines or the current guidelines that really were sort of prescriptive, sort of every library should have them, et cetera, et cetera. So now we've tried to pull these out at the very beginning. They include things such as your library should be legally established or must be legally established under state statute. It has to comply with the Nebraska library laws, rules, and regulations. It has to have a governing or administrative board or an advisory board that is, in fact, certified by the Nebraska Library Commission. The library directory has to be certified at the level which is required by the certification guidelines and so forth and so on. So there are 12 of those which you will see when you actually see the guidelines. A strategic plan is required, which you've now heard probably four times. There are three levels of accreditation, not the old ones, but their bronze, silver, and gold, which we think would be more understandable and easier to remember than the old ones, which all began with a letter E. We're going to fill in as much as possible statistics from those that you submit, which is also one of the requirements, from those that you submit to us annually so that some of these things will be automatically filled in. So you don't have to go back and say, what was that? What was it that I said on that statistical reporting form? And a really interesting feature of the current guidelines is we're going to try as much as we can to have peer groups of libraries. Right now you know that the current guidelines have population groups, 0 to 500, 501, 2, whatever, and those are somewhat arbitrary population groups that we're currently using. So what we're going to do or what we're planning to do is to try to get 10 libraries on either side of your library in terms of your local population that you serve to see what their statistics are, and you will be compared against your peer group as opposed to compared against all the libraries within those arbitrarily decided population groups. We're still working on tweaking that, but we hope to have that finished by the time the guidelines are used. We also have a lot of links and notes that are going to be in these guidelines that will explain, further explain things. You know, for those of you who've done this over the last several years, we have had some notes at the beginning of the accreditation guidelines, but these will be embedded within the guidelines themselves so that they'll be an electronic link which will explain a definition or which will link you to more information such as the state statutes that relate to public libraries, Chapter 51, for example. Now we'll also have a point system which we haven't used before. This is an interesting sort of development that we have. Under the current guidelines, you have to meet all the essential guidelines before you can move on to the enhanced level, then you have to meet all the essential and all the enhanced guidelines before you can move on to the excellent level. We're doing things differently this time. We're actually having a point system that will be a total of 275 points in these guidelines themselves, and I've laid out here on this sheet the five sections of the guidelines which we have. There's governance and planning which has a total of 50 points, resources which has a total of 111 points, services, a total of 40 points, cooperation and collaboration, a total of 32 points, and communications for a total of 42 points for 275 points. I'm going to go back in just a minute to tell you about some of the guidelines that are in each of those sections, but right now I want to stick to the point system here. So what we've determined that is that for the three levels of service to be accredited at the bronze level, it requires 175 points at the silver level, 200 points, and at the gold level, 250 points. That's what we've come up with for this year. We're going to see how it works. And let me tell you just a little bit about what's in those sections of the guidelines themselves. Under Governments, we have things such as reviews the strategic plan annually that the library is to have. The library has board policies that are necessary for the successful functioning of the library, and the more policies you have, the more points you get. That's one of those where you actually can earn additional points. It has a technology plan, reviews the technology plan annually, and so forth and so on. Those are just some of the ones under Governments and Planning. What's interesting about these guidelines is that every one of those guidelines that are listed has, after it, a section that says library goal or goals. So you have to identify which of your library goal or goals applies to that particular accreditation guideline. That's why, back to the initial idea, if you don't have a plan with goals, measurable goals and so forth, then you can't indicate there what that applies to. So that's again why it is essential for you to have that plan. Under Resources, the second section, there are things such as local income, facilities, how many hours are you open? Staff, expenditures on staff equal to or greater than the average or median of your peer group that I talked about earlier. Technology, whether you have an integrated library system or not. Do you have a library catalog that's on the internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? Collection, annual expenditures on your collection and so forth. And each of those guidelines again has, at the end of it, library goal or goals that relate to each of the guidelines. Your services, the third part, are things such as you offer outreach programs and services to the community appropriate to the library's mission. You collaborate with other community organizations. Your attendance per capita is equal to or greater than your peer group. And under cooperation and collaboration, we have things such as the library director or a member of the library board attends at least two village board city council or county commission or township board meetings a year. Library board members and library staff participate in regional or statewide national advocacy efforts such as the Nebraska Library Association Annual Advocacy Day. Under Communications, the last part here, we have things such as the library posts its mission statement and policies on the library website. The library uses non-internet public relations and marketing tools in addition to those listed above to reach all members of the community. And what is different again about these guidelines is that under the old guidelines, as I said earlier, you had to meet all the guidelines on the essential level before you move to enhance, and those two before you move to the excellent level. With the point system that we have with a total of 275 points, if your library is either lacking or weak in a certain area and you don't earn enough points, those can be offset by other sections of the guidelines. That means that, for example, your library won't automatically be disqualified if it does not have adequate local resources if you have enough points from other sections of the guidelines that may offset that. I hope you enjoy the planning processes we're putting together for you. Perhaps, enjoy isn't the correct word. But I think that these will be very useful for you and we look forward, both the system administrators and our staff here at the commission, look forward to working with you for this process. Hello and welcome to our video on planning for Nebraska Public Libraries. I'm Laura Johnson, the Continuing Education Coordinator for the Nebraska Library Commission. I have with me today Denise Horrers, the Director of the Republican Valley Library System, Eric Green, the Coordinator for the Panhandle Library System, Sarah Warnicke, the Director of the Northeast Library System, and Sharon Osega, the Director of the Meridian Library System. And we're going to talk about planning. The new accreditation guidelines kind of require that a library have a plan. And this is because it was felt that the guidelines really needed to talk about fulfilling local needs and how well you did fulfilling the needs of your community. So, you need a plan. And we know that many libraries are really into the planning process and spent quite a lot of time and effort on planning, but we know that other libraries maybe haven't done quite as much in that area. So, we thought we'd get together and try to develop kind of a way for you to develop a quick plan for your accreditation application so that you would have it. And then it would be very useful to you in your operations. So, we're each going to do kind of a piece of our agenda today. We hope that you'll find them useful. You can use it either by piece by piece or you can see the whole thing if you like. And let us know what you think. Thanks. This first section is on why plan. One of the questions I've been asked over the years is, why does my library need a plan? We seem to be doing pretty good the way we're going. But I'm going to answer that question with a question of my own. How do you know where your library's headed if you don't have a plan? As far as I can tell, you're just going with no discernible direction. You don't know if what you're doing is working or not or if it's even what your people in your community want. So, here are some reasons why I think you need a plan. Number one, planning allows you to find out what your community wants from the library in a way of services and programs. This may not be what you think they want. So, you really need to find out from them what it is they actually want. Once you know what your community wants, you can better allocate your resources to providing those things and cutting out what they don't want. This is called cutting out all of those dead things that maybe nobody wants anymore. Do you still have a record collection? Is anybody using them? Those are the kinds of things you might want to cut out. It will also help you prepare for changes coming in the future. And we know we're in a rapidly changing society, especially in terms of technology. So, you need to make those changes and plan for those. This is going to force you to establish priorities. And this is a hard one. We all want to do everything for everybody. And that's just not possible. So, you're going to establish your priorities based on what your community is asked for. That means you're going to probably cut out some things that you're doing right now. If you need increased funding, a plan will help you get to your funding authority and show the need. You can say, well, this is what the community wants. This is the amount of money we're going to need to do that. So, it really helps when you go in and you can really support your request for increased funding. You're also going to get insight from other people's perspectives. And somebody's going to talk about who's going to be on your planning committee. But this is going to be a group of people that many of them are people you probably don't work with. They may be non-library people. So, they're going to bring a different perspective than yours. And that's going to help in getting some freshness into where your library's plan is going. You're going to discover new ways of thinking about old problems, and you're probably going to do something like the SWOT analysis. Look at your strengths, your weaknesses, your opportunities, and your threats. That's going to help you, again, figure out where you're going with your plan. You may also find alternatives beyond the resources that your library is traditionally used. This means there are a lot of agencies and online sources out there that we didn't used to have that we have now. And those are going to be available. So, maybe some things you've been doing you don't need to do anymore because somebody else can do it better than you. A plan is also going to provide more seamless transitions during staffing changes. And for me personally, this is something I deal with quite a bit in my job. I have seen numerous times where a library director leaves, a new person comes in, without a plan. They have no idea what the library's been doing or where it's going. It's really important that you have something on paper to show them what your goals and objectives are. So, that's one that I really personally have a strong feeling about. And finally, you're going to be forced to make choices. I've said before, you can't do it all. And the planning process team is going to have to narrow down choices and figure out what is manageable and doable with the money that you have. And that's it for my part. Somebody else is going to actually start the actual planning process. It's time to determine the composition of your planning team. Most community-based planning committees include one or two staff people and a board member as formal participants. If possible, staff other than the library director should be appointed. If the library director is on the committee, community members will naturally look to them for ideas and answers. And it's important that this be about the community and what they want and need. Invite community stakeholders to be a part of your planning team. Who can influence the elected officials? Who are the leaders of the different civic groups in your area? Look for planning team members with special skills such as knowledge of technology, city planning, law, fundraising, marketing, literacy, and local government. Include representatives of the demographic and socioeconomic groups on the planning team. Identify young people, seniors, parents, business leaders, and people from various ethnic groups as potential committee members. Invite five to twelve individuals to serve on your planning team. And it's important to make it official. Send them a letter and ask for an assigned agreement in return. To be successful, planning team members must be able to reach agreement on issues under consideration. There are three general approaches to reaching agreement in groups. First, there's consensus building, or voting, or the forced choice option. By far, consensus building is the best approach for making important decisions. Consensus promotes hard thinking that really gets at the issues. To build consensus, you need to separate people from the problem. Discussions can shift from issues to personalities. Keep the discussion firmly focused on the topic under review. Focus on interests, not positions. Positions are those preconceived opinions of the group members. Keep the group focused on the best interest of the library. Generate a variety of options before deciding what to do. Since there's no one right way to do things, identify and discuss a variety of ideas to accomplish the designated goals. Base decisions on objective criteria. Define the criteria that will be used to evaluate the options and ideas. Otherwise, emotion may dictate the decision. And when the group finally reaches consensus, it has developed a solution that will have the support needed for implementation. Alright, now that you know why to plan and how to form your planning team, it's time to move on to the next step. And as silly as it's going to sound, you will need to plan to plan. Planning to plan is the key to success for working with these new guidelines. There's a lot of information to cover and you don't want to fall behind. Make sure to accommodate for and take the time to do it right. You don't want to find that something doesn't work and have to redo it later. Start planning, let's say, several weeks before you start working on your actual plan. It will be far better to overestimate how long it will take you to complete everything than to have to rush through something at the end. Do whatever will be best for your staff, your library, and your community. Denise already talked to you about forming a planning team. If you were able to, and much of this will depend on how many people agreed to be on your planning team, consider forming several smaller teams to work on different parts of your plan at the same time. Even having two teams will make a big difference in how long it will take you to complete all the pieces of your plan by the accreditation deadline. Regardless of whether or not you form these smaller teams, you will want to create a schedule and stick to it as best you can. Creating a schedule and assigning deadlines for finishing each part will help you stay on track and not fall behind. Give yourself and your teams tight but reasonable deadlines to ensure that you not only complete your plan, but the rest of the accreditation guidelines by the deadline. When assigning deadlines, try to find a balance between the parts that will be easier for your teams to complete and the parts that you know will take more time. It will also be important for you to include time for your teams to do a little bit of research into your community or the needs and all of that as you are working on each step. Ideally, if this is your first time creating your plan, it should probably take you about three months. If you already have a plan in place, it obviously won't take you as long since it will be mostly in a revision type of process. To help with this, I have created a schedule that you can use as an aid in setting up and maintaining your planning schedule. It begins by being broken down into months starting in July and going through to October. From there, it is broken down to several categories to give you space to list your teams, particular pieces they are working on, as well as the deadline you want them to have, the date is actually finished and then a final review date. To give you an idea of what is to come as you are planning your schedule, there are four steps in the planning process. Each of these steps will have a worksheet that will help you work through them. Once you've completed each worksheet, you will have essentially completed your plan. In the rest of the accreditation guidelines outside of your plan, each guideline will have a link to clarify the requirement and to give you an example of what it is asking you to do. Now in your plan, you will begin it with a community profile which will help you determine where you are now. Second, you will investigate the needs of your community. Third, you will take stock of your talents and resources before moving ahead and creating your mission. Finally, you will set some priorities and to begin to develop your goals before officially putting your plan into motion. We will be having an Encompass Live session on May 22nd to help you explain some of these planning processes in a little bit more detail. After that, we anticipate being able to reach the guidelines in early July and you will have until October to complete your application. When your library is due to reapply, you will receive a notification with further details on how to begin the application process. Now that we have covered some introductory details and planning to plan, Eric will come in and walk you through how to approach and gather information for developing your community profile and needs assessment. Hello, I'm going to be talking to you about the community profile and also the community needs assessment. So what is a community profile? A community profile is a summary of the history, present conditions, anticipated future of an area. It provides an overview or a series of a snapshot of an area that is used for the basis of identifying potential impacts of proposed library services. How to profile a community. You define the community boundaries and neighborhood boundaries, locate the businesses, residents and activity centers of potential impact, determine demographic characteristics, economic base, location of community facilities and other characteristics. And some of those community characteristics examples are population and demographic characteristics, economic and social history characteristics, physical characteristics related to community activities. To project identification of this project, what is the role of the community impact analysis in defining the project? Also the study area, what is the scope of the geographical area to be examined? Also public involvement, which I'll be dealing with in the second part with a survey in our focus group covering the needs assessment. One of the questions you're going to be asking is, how do I get information, especially if my community city does not, office does not have some misinformation. And in the worksheet I will include some contacts for you to find basic statistics for your analysis. And I want to talk about just the community profile worksheet, just some of the issues with it. Now you can use as many of these as you want or you can add your own. And so I'm just going to give you some examples of what this is and what I'm asking here. The geography or physical characteristics of community. The first question is, what is the area size of the community of your library service? And that's just an example, the first one. The second area is population characteristics of the community. It's like what is the total population of your area? The next area is economic characteristics of your community. And the first example is, what are the major employers of your community? The next one is educational characteristics of your community. Obviously, what percentage of the population is in certain aspects of schooling at the time. And so you can see this on the worksheet and you can work with that. And also you want to know your cultural characteristics of your community. And the first question, the typical question is, describe the cultural and recreational activities of the population. I'm going to talk to you about community needs, part of the worksheet number six, which has to deal with surveys. Basically, answers to survey questions can, as a proof of the community, that has a certain library needs. Surveys are a good idea, as they often tell you things that you had no idea people thought about the library and they give you suggestions for services. They make sure patrons, make sure they don't put on surveys so they remain anonymous. This way, they might be able to speak more openly about things they really do need. Now survey questions, you can write them or choose the ones that I've added to this list here in your worksheet. And basically, we have basic questions. We have service questions. And in the very last part, there's writing questions. And please feel free to write in what you feel your community would need. Because this is basically your area and you're the expert in this area to know what this is. And the reason you want to do a survey, obviously, is you want to get feedback. But if you have an issue with the time in doing the surveys, there's also another approach called focus groups. Now focus groups basically are a small group, typically eight to 12 people. Usually, you want to make them a very diverse group in your community. And basically, you have a moderator and you have focus on a certain topic. The aim is to have a discussion of individual responses to formal questions and to produce preferences and beliefs that may or may not represent the general population. We're going to talk now about taking stock from your library. We've talked about how you put together your planning team and how you plan to plan and how you need to get your information about your community and about your community needs. And now we need to talk about how you get information about your library. You have already actually provided a lot of information about your library. The Public Library Statistical Report that you turn in every year has all kinds of stuff in it. And we're not going to ask you to do it over again. So just get that out and take a look at it. But you'll see a bunch of numbers and what do you do with a bunch of numbers? Well, there's really kind of three things you can do with statistics or three ways to handle them. And you actually don't pick one way. You probably will use all three in different places. But when you have numbers, you can either compare the numbers to a standard. For instance, our accreditation guidelines right now require that you weed 3% per year. That's a standard. So if you're weeding 4%, you're doing really well. Of course, if you're weeding 45%, maybe you make this problem. But you want to compare it to a standard that someone generally an authority has set. Or you can do benchmarking where you essentially compare your statistics to your peers' statistics. And there's a terrific application at the Institute of Museum and Library Services website, the Library Compare thing, where you can literally go in and compare the statistics that you have with another library. So if you go in and you choose a library that serves about the same population that you serve and that has about the same kind of budget that you have, then you can see, well, then are we doing as much programming as they are? And you can actually compare yourself to a group of libraries too if you want to. And that's one of the things that our new accreditation guidelines is going to do, instead of asking you to meet a standard for things like your budget or your hours open or things like that, it's essentially going to say, are you comparable to your peers? Then there's another way to enhance statistics. So we've had meeting a standard or benchmarking, comparing yourself to other libraries or comparing yourself to your peers. And then the third one is comparing yourself to yourself over time. Would you circulate more books this year than you did last year? That's probably good. You can call that an upward trend. And of course then, that really brings up another point, which is it becomes critical that these statistics are collected in a consistent way. And it's amazing how differently people look at collecting statistics. In fact, if you sit down with the other staff members in your library and talk about how you collect statistics, you're going to be amazed. Is, where is the bathroom? A reference question? It may or may not be. And actually, it doesn't matter what you choose. You can decide to do it however you want to do it. But everybody needs to do it the same way. And you need to do it the same way over time. Otherwise, you end up comparing apples and oranges. So, you might want to spend a little time thinking about your statistics and how you're collecting them and making sure that you're collecting them consistently. That's hard to say. But you can use those statistics. So that's really going to give you a pretty good picture of your library, actually. Kind of a shorthand picture in numbers of how your library is doing. But then there's another thing that we can do to take a look at the library and what your strengths and weaknesses are, which, curiously enough, is called these strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, or SWAT. Which is not a bunch of guys in black running around with guns. It's SWOT. And generally, it's just put on a grid. And you say, well, these are our strengths. These are our weaknesses. These are the opportunities we see in the world around us. These are the threats from other things. What we've done in our worksheet, because there is a worksheet for you to do a SWAT, is we've kind of categorized some of the things about your library so you can say what are the strengths there and what are the weaknesses. Now, for instance, we say human resources. You're a director, you're staff, you're volunteers. What are the strengths and what are the weaknesses? Let's hope that the staff is the strength. Usually the staff is the strength. Usually the staff is what's keeping it all together. But is there a weakness in staff? For instance, you really could use another set of hands sometimes. Well, that's a weakness. And the strength is that the staff is extraordinarily dedicated. They've done a lot of continuing education. They're really up to date on technology. You know, that kind of thing. So you really look at that. Now, not every category has to have both strengths and weaknesses. Or it doesn't have to be all strength. They're all weakness. Things are usually pretty much a mixed bag. Let's face it. So you just find the strengths and weaknesses and find the main ones. Not every little thing is going to matter. What you want to do is get them, what the library really does well, what the library really has going for it, and then what the library would like to do a lot better but isn't working out for some reason. And those are your strengths and weaknesses. You kind of balance them. Then your external environment, the opportunities and threats. For instance, an economic opportunity. There's a new plant opening in town. That's going to bring more jobs. It may bring more people to town. But is it going to bring people who are going to need particular kinds of resources? Is it going to bring an influx of immigrants who may need literacy information, information about immigration? Now, that's an opportunity, but it's also a threat if you can't provide those, if you can't provide that information. So you really need to look at things both ways. And we've tried to also give you categories for your external environment in terms of economy, technology, social climate, community relations, or other. You don't have to confine yourself to these categories, nor are these categories meant to be constricting. They're really just meant to help kind of guide you and help your thinking kind of move along kind of what prime the pump, prime the pump I think is a good way to put it. So, if you take a look at your statistics and then you do a SWAT and you list your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, you will have taken stock of your library. And at that point you can say, well, and here's the strengths in our library, here's some of the community needs, we think we can meet. And talk about your mission statement and then you can start developing your goals for the next year or couple of years. And Denise will talk about those. Thank you. It's time to set priorities. And I would suggest that you designate three categories of focus. The selection in these categories can be done by the library director, along with assistance from her library board, his or her library board, or by the planning team. The decision about which categories to focus on should be based on what the people of the community served need and want. Not what has always been done at the library. The priorities handout contains a list of categories with examples of most of the primary library services. But communities differ. So it's imperative to provide what works best in your own community. Here are some examples of goals related to the community needs. So if your community needs basic literacy, goals might include ESL programs, tutoring, exam prep guides, and if your community needs a meeting space, your goals could include preparing those meeting rooms, community events, bulletin board, and even a coffee shop. Maybe your community needs a place for recreation and current titles. Then your goals could include book talks, author visits, display shelving, and a focus on readers' advisory. If your community wants to support the formal learning in your town, you could have a home work help center, or computer lab, or tutoring, or group study rooms. So you just have to base it on what your community wants. Once the categories have been chosen, the planning team can identify options for providing services related to those community needs. First, the team will need to generate ideas, and this is one method for doing that. Give the participants five to ten minutes to write down possible services in those three designated categories. It's not the time to jot down a fully formed plan. Each idea should be written on an individual three by five card. Collect the cards and read the ideas out loud. Write them on the poster size newsprint, one for each category, and make it large enough so everyone can see it. This is the time to discuss the ideas and determine which ones are of the most interest. Select a total of five options within those three categories that you want to work on. That keeps your plan small and workable. These five options will develop into the goals on your strategic plan. Now, you're going to need to evaluate those goals, and one method to do that is to use the SMART acronym. So goals should be specific. To set a specific goal, you must answer the six W questions. Who is involved? What do we want to accomplish? Where will this be done? When will it be finished? Which requirements and constraints need to be considered, and why are we doing this? The goals must be measurable. There's the M. Establish concrete criteria to measure the progress. Goals must be attainable. That's A, attainable. Identify the goals that are the most important to the group, and figure out ways to make them happen. If it's something you want to do, you'll figure it out. Goals must be realistic. Ask the group if this is a goal that everyone is willing and able to work towards reaching. A high goal can be reached if it is something that the whole group values. And goals must be timely, and I think this is one of the biggest parts of this discussion. T for timely. If there is no timeframe, there's no sense of urgency or no motivation to begin working on it. So you need to set a deadline. After the goals have been developed and determined, you need to write those objectives. Objectives are the steps taken to reach each goal. Every objective has the same three elements. A measure, a standard, so you can compare your measure to that, and a timeframe. You need a date, and your standard must be met. The handout for developing goals and objectives has a well-written objective example for you. Now you'll need to ask your planning team to write two objectives for each of the five identified goals. And with this, your worksheet is filled out and you're getting mighty close to be in time to act. Point where you have gotten through your planning process, you have goals, you have objectives that you want to reach, and you have goals for that. How are you going to carry those out? Some things are just part of daily operations. If you say that you want to improve circulation, well that's kind of part of daily operations. But some things are kind of projects. A project has a start and an end. That's sort of the definition of a project. And what do you do? How do you make a project move along? Well, project management is a whole thing unto itself and they get all carried away with all their jargon and stuff. But really, it's kind of, you know that triangle that you've seen a thousand times that's quality, speed, and expense. And you could have two of the three. If it's fast and it's good, it won't be cheap. If it's cheap and it's fast, it won't be good. Well, that's kind of project management and a nutshell right there. You have to kind of watch the time, the budget, and the scope of the project. And that really is major. Everything I read and everything that talked about, the scope of the project, don't let the project grow. How do you do this? Well, the first thing is you really want to have a very clear idea of what the project is. You actually want a written statement of what the project is, what it's trying to achieve so that everybody's clear. And you want to know how are you going to measure the project, as Denise said. You really have to know how you're going to know if it was a success or not. So you want a clear statement of your objectives. Then you want to plan the project that literally means hauling out your calendar and starting at the end and working backwards. How long is it going to take? What are all the steps that you need to make? And don't plan tasks. They tell you to plan milestones. In other words, plan places where you've completed a particular part of the overall project and celebrate when you get to those. That's really important because that keeps everybody's spirits up because you know that in the middle of any project it becomes a slog and you really wish you never started it. But if you celebrate your interim successes, everybody will be much happier. Then, again, the scope. You're going to have a set of meetings in the meeting room. Don't get carried away and decide it would really be nice to paint that room. That's making the scope of the project bigger and that's going to sort of dynamite your success. Keep your project online with what you agreed. If your project was painting, that's fine. But don't add in extra things. This, of course, is extremely applicable to say remodeling. I gather remodeling is notorious for this. Well, we might as well. And pretty soon you build another wing and it costs a half a million dollars. So you don't want to do that. You want to manage the scope. And I wanted to say a word about budgeting because a lot of times in the library the budget is going to be, well, zip. But sometimes you're going to have some money for a project, especially if, say, it was grant funded. And there are two ways then, of course, there are lots of ways, but the two ways we really think about looking at budgets are the line item where you have so much budgeted for the gas bill and so much budgeted for the electric bill and so much budgeted for the janitor's salary. Or you can use program budgeting, which is you take the part of the gas bill that you could apply to that program. Say that program meant that you were going to be open five extra hours a week. Well, then you would take that much extra on the gas bill and charge it to that program. You would take that much extra on your salaries and charge it to that program. So you actually begin then to know how much the program itself costs. This can be a very good discipline, and especially again, if it's, say, grant funded or funded in some special way, you may actually need that information. And you have to decide what you're going to include in your program budget. Is it just going to be the supplies for whatever you were doing, learning to make crepes in the library? Is it just for flour? Or are you going to include, again, keeping the library open, having to buy some special pans, all the different things that would be part of that program. So there's several things to think about, but the big things with your project are make sure you know what the project is and everybody agrees on it and get into writing because then you won't have a disagreement about it later. Know how you're going to measure your success. Keep your scope reasonable. Keep track of your budget. Remember that you're talking about cost, quality, and time, and you have to manage all of those and kind of balance them. And then at the end, you do want to be sure that you evaluate. And we have talked about evaluating that we'll make for a successful project. And we hope for a great plan that you've really fulfilled. The final piece is evaluation. And for most people, this just puts the fear of God into their stomach. And it does for me, too. Evaluation is probably my least favorite thing to do, but it's really important that you evaluate how your plan is going. The overall goal of planning and evaluating your plan is to determine if what you've created in your plan has value for your customers. In other words, what real difference did it make to them? How often you plan? Your planning is probably going to be for two to three years at a time, but there may be goals that you need to revisit maybe at a year or at two years rather than three years. So each goal is going to probably be different on when you evaluate it. Now, historically, libraries have done really good measuring with statistics. And our funding authorities still like to get statistics. How many people walked in the door? How many volumes went out? But nowadays, we look beyond the statistics and we want to hear the stories. How did your summer reading program affect lives? How did helping somebody get them a new job? Those are the stories we want to look at in evaluation. So overall, how did your library services programs and the space that you provide for them impact your customer? As a part of the evaluation process, you're going to monitor the progress or your lack of progress on your goals and objectives and make the needed adjustments to go on with the plan in the next year. So questions to ask here include, are the activities being implemented as planned? Why or why not? What is facilitating or impeding you implementing those activities? In other words, and this is really summarized as evaluation. What worked, what didn't work, and what can you do to change it so it does work? Now, did all of your activities fit within your plan's objectives? Are there goal areas that are receiving less attention than others? And why? And this may be important that you go back and look at those priorities again, because your priorities may not be what you thought they were going to be. What did the results indicate on how to improve and is there a need to change the plan for the next two or three years to better meet the ongoing needs of your customers because your customer base may change after a year or so. You just don't know. Now included in your materials is an evaluation worksheet and I want to go over that in a little more detail. The first question on the evaluation worksheet says who will be on the evaluation team? This may be very specific. Say you're looking at a goal that's about use services. Obviously, your use services library will be on that team. You probably always need at least one library person on there and maybe one person that's not involved in that department helping because they give a different perspective. But you do need to list out who's going to be on the team. Now, you're going to do one of these evaluation worksheets for each of the goals that's in your plan. Now, question number two. What are you going to evaluate? This is where you're going to describe the goal that you're actually looking at. Number three, what is the purpose of the evaluation? Why are you evaluating this goal? What do you need to know? And number four kind of works right in with that. How will you use the evaluation? I mean, it's fine. You get all this information about how what are you going to do with the information once you get it. Number five, what questions will the evaluation answer? So, you see these questions all work together on finding the information. What is it you want to know? And number six, the greatest question on this. What information do you need to answer the question? So, send two columns. What do you wish to know? And indicators, how will I know it? So, you need both of those pieces in order to do the evaluation completely. And finally, when is the evaluation needed? It's always important to put in line on something because the evaluation could go on for months if you don't say we need this in four weeks. So, I think that's also important. So, that's it. That sums up the whole planning process as a whole. Just know that the Nebraska Library Commission and your regional library system staffs are always here to help you. Feel free to call or email us with any questions that you might have or any help that you need with the planning process. Thank you.