A Library SCOREcard – Performance on a page
A modern public library – a good modern public library – is a multi-layered community asset. It offers a varied range of services to people of all ages and interests. From the very young to the very old. From books to activities to comfortable places and spaces. From language literacy to digital literacy to social inclusion and creative communities. Some people pop in to the library for 10 minutes, some stay for 3-4 hours. Some visit once or twice a year, some come every day. For some the library is a useful resource, for others it is an essential part of their being.
Which I have discovered over half a career of contemplation and analysis makes it very difficult to distil library performance, community value or impact into a single metric. As much as I, and some significant stakeholders, would like to do this the reality is that it just doesn’t work. There is simply too much going on at the library to simplify it into a one KPI.
So I have abandoned the pursuit of such a metric and settled on the idea of a Library SCOREcard – a way of capturing library data and commentary on a single page. A page that combines quantitative and qualitative information, and a page that gives different stakeholders a clear view on what makes that library tick and how it supports community interests.
Here is the rationale.
The ‘value’ of public libraries
Any well-run business or service organisation understands that it has an obligation to those who provide it with resources to demonstrate that it:
achieves its intended aims
operates efficiently
is a good investment of resources (in social or economic terms).
Australian public libraries share these obligations:
in being accountable for expenditure of ratepayers’ money
in seeking sustainable funding for community-based library services
in competing for funds in constrained Council resource environments.
Knowing or believing that the library is a good and valuable service for the community is not enough. This must be demonstrated to relevant stakeholders – funders, customers, the community, staff.
Measuring library performance
Historically, public libraries have reported on their “performance” by sharing data on ‘the number of things’ – the number of loans, number of library visitors, number of items in the collection, etc. Volume data like this points to levels of library use. However, on its own this data says nothing about:
whether the collections, programs and services provided are best suited to the needs of the community
whether this level of use is appropriate for the library’s community
whether the library has any impact on individual or community outcomes
whether the library delivers value to its community.
The performance reporting challenge
Over the past 20 years meaningful research effort has been put into understanding the ‘value’ of public libraries in Australia, for example, through Libraries Building Communities (State Library of Victoria), Dollars, Sense and Public Libraries (SLV), Guidelines, Standards and Outcome Measures for Australian Public Libraries (APLA/ALIA), Culture Counts surveys and the South Australian Libraries’ Performance Framework.
While some individual library services have been successful in arguing for maintenance of recurrent funding and investment in library infrastructure:
there is still considerable and valid pressure from Councils on libraries to justify their value to the community
there is no single measure of public library performance, value or return on investment to the community
there is no industry-wide approach to addressing this significant data gap.
The Balanced Scorecard
More than 30 years ago Kaplan and Norton popularized the idea of a Balanced Scorecard for tracking performance of a commercial organisation (Harvard Business Review, 1992). The Balanced Scorecard acknowledged the many dimensions of a successful business and encouraged managers to look beyond a single financial measure of performance and consider four critical perspectives:
Financial: How do we look to our shareholders?
Customer: What is important to our customers and stakeholders?
Internal business processes: What must we excel at?
Learning and growth: How can we continue to improve, create and innovate?
The Balanced Scorecard approach is still widely used today as a tool in structured corporate strategic management.
Public libraries are not commercially focused, but as they create value for library users and the community across multiple dimensions the concept of a Balanced Scorecard is as valid for libraries as it is for major corporates.
So …
What if, instead of trying to distil the many types of public library use and impact and value into a single measure, or type of measure, we took a Balanced Scorecard approach and presented a simple set of measures that recognise the many dimensions of a contemporary public library? For example:
data on operating efficiency
feedback from customers
benchmarking data on industry comparisons
estimates of the social and economic return on investment.
The following table shows 5 different types of data that answer questions for 5 different library stakeholders who all have different perspectives on library performance – library customers, the community, funding organisations, the library industry and the local library itself.
And if you run your eye down the left-hand side of the first column in the table you will see the emergence of a Library SCOREcard. [Now if you were presenting these 5 ideas in a logical sequential order you would probably have a Library ECSORcard, but let’s not do that!]
What does this look like in practice? Well, stay tuned for my next blog article which will run through each of these 5 elements and show you how this data can be systematically compiled and put on a single page to give you a solid conversation starter for discussions with library staff, the Council and your local community.