“Everything Old is New Again” is the title of a 1999 article in American Libraries by Douglas Raber, author of the excellent and eye-opening book, Librarianship and Legitimacy: The Ideology of the Public Library Inquiry. The article sug- gests that the Inquiry, a comprehensive assessment of public librarianship initiated by ALA in the late 1940′s, continues to be relevant to libraries today. While in library school I discovered Raber’s book in the stacks of Cleveland Public Library. The book was so inspiring that I got ahold of 3 of the 7 volumes of the Inquiry (thank you, CPL!) and read them also.
Now the next piece in my story: My colleague Keith Curry Lance had recom- mended a podcast series to me. It is called “Longshots” and is broadcast by Sarah Long, Executive Director of the North Suburban Library System outside Chicago. 
I decided to take a listen and chose a December 2008 interview with Cathy de Rosa and Jenny Johnson, primary authors of the OCLC study, From Funding To Awareness: A Study of Library Support in America. A couple of months ago I studied the first half of this voluminous and highly graphicized report. In case I never got back to the second half, I thought I’d see how the audio book version went. [Read more...]
Posted in Advocacy, Research
Tagged awareness of library services, library funding, library marketing, merit, North Suburban Library System, OCLC, Public Library Inquiry, quality, value, worth
This week I noticed that WebJunction is conducting a survey entitled “Technology Competencies Evaluation.” I think this must be a sequel to a survey I saw there last month about “management core competencies.” While the surveys are probably marketing research for WebJunction’s e-learning product line, the researchers say they want to use the data to “establish a baseline for the library field.” Thus, they do profess an interest in identifying larger and, we might conclude, non-commercial trends within the library profession.
Whatever their intentions, the surveys won’t produce much reliable information due to poor designs. First, neither questionnaire actually assesses 
competencies, that is, knowledge or skill levels. Instead, they measure respondents’ opinions about their own knowledge and skills in a dozen or so training topics. So, any baselines WebJunction comes up with will be merely about current opinions which would later be compared to some subsequent set of opinions. [Read more...]
I want to explain why LJ Index scores are not well-behaved. That is, why they don’t conform to neat and tidy intervals the way HAPLR scores range from about 30 to 930. HAPLR scores fall into a predictable range because they are built on percentiles. Any given library’s score is a sum of 15 percentile rankings, one for each statistical item HAPLR uses (like circulation per visit). As you probably know, percentiles range from from 99th down to zero(th). (Nobody can be in the exact 100th percentile for reasons I’ll skip here.) If a library ranks at the 99th percentile for all 15 HAPLR items, that library earns a score of 990. If it ranks at the lowest (0th) percentile for all of the items, then it gets a score of zero. In reality, libraries don’t get all high or all low rankings on the 15 HAPLR items—they get a mixture. [Read more...]
Joe Matthews (San Jose State U.), Larry White (East Carolina U.) and I just completed a workshop at PLA’s 2009 Spring Symposium in Nashville. My main role was to present on the LJ Index. But I want to focus here on a different topic–customer satisfaction.
Joe led a segment on this topic, noting that there is a definite halo effect when customers report satisfaction levels. For some reason 
public library users report they are very highly satisfied irrespective of the actual quality of services or details of their service interactions. They have low expectations, in other words. [Read more...]
