A Library Scorecard
In 2018 I had the pleasure (misfortune?) of speaking to a Council CEO who confidently told me that they only needed one indicator to judge the performance of their library and its value to the community – the average cost per visit (and let’s not get diverted here by debating what the total annual cost of running a library divided by the number of visits actually means, especially when you only count Council $). I rather foolishly responded by saying that if that was the only measure of success they could do away with eResources, shut down the mobile library and put a big question mark over Story Time and staff intensive programs in smaller libraries. To date, none of these things have happened, so I suspect that in reality there are a couple of other measures that this CEO (and the community) are interested in.
But it does raise the question of ‘What is the best measure of a library’s performance?’ Or more correctly, ‘What are the best measures of library performance?’, as I’m pretty sure we can’t yet meaningfully distil all of the services, outputs and outcomes of a library into a single measure. Many corporates now think in terms of a triple bottom line of social, environmental and financial measures (People – Planet – Profit), and even the Balanced Scorecard (remember that) had four quadrants.
I continue to refine my thinking, but as of now my Library Scorecard looks like this. (The numbers are for illustration only – they’re not an actual library).
The top part of the Scorecard has nine measures – three related to provision of a library service , one for operating efficiency and five that look at the use of that service and customer satisfaction. Most of the measures look at performance from a per capita perspective as this normalises (to some extent) the differences between libraries serving population catchments and communities of differing size. The bottom part of the Scorecard looks at outcomes and is still a work in progress. Here’s what I look for in each of the top nine measures.
So there’s my Library Scorecard. It has a little bit of everything in it, which means that most libraries will find themselves doing well on some aspects and less well on others. Which of course begs two questions.
1. How do I know if a library is performing well? What am I comparing it to? AND
2. What are the outcome measures we should be tracking?
The answers to those questions are for another day.