ISO Public Library Vision, Mission, Goals & Objectives

February 8, 2007 3:50 PM

To librarians: I am looking for a strategic plan for a public library. It needs to have the following components: vision, mission, goals and objectives. I have to review the four parts for my Library Management course. Thanks in advance PS Ideally I would prefer short yet detailed (I saw one that was 34 pages today!)
posted by melissaz to Education (7 answers total)

Are these any good? Found through Google. Toronto (25 pages), Peoria (24 pages), Springfield (short, but appears to be the whole thing - separate data report and implementation plan). (IANALibrarian, though I do a lot of strategic planning.)
posted by paduasoy at 4:16 PM on February 8, 2007

Without knowing what you're looking for -- what was wrong with the one you already saw? -- it will be tough to do better than to google for libraries' strategic plans that are online. Here is a good sample out of that set. Here are six sample library plans from Canada. If finding a plan is part of your homework assignment, it's not strictly kosher to have us here doing that for you.
posted by jessamyn at 4:40 PM on February 8, 2007

The system I work for has its 6.5 page plan here. Good luck!
posted by ejvalentine at 6:29 PM on February 8, 2007

I'm not a librarian either, may I still answer your question?

Here is ours.

I think I agree with Jessamyn that this is Treif for homework, but at the same time, this is a web 2.0-ish, we-are-the-machine way to do your homework, right? It's not like you're paying us to answer your question. I guess Google dealt a mortal blow to demand for reference service, and AskMeFi finished the job.
posted by ulotrichous at 9:13 PM on February 8, 2007

Ah...actually the homework part is to analyze the plan according to the readings Ive been doing (hence not really wanting to analyze the 34 pager). Help getting the plan is Kosher considering my professor assumed my local pl would have one online or ready to hand out and they didnt (manager didnt even know how she would get ahold of it. Prof. is very strict in what the plan should have: mission, vision, goals and objectives. Most plans Ive seen use different terms (which is fine) so Im trying to find one that best matches his criteria.
posted by melissaz at 5:24 AM on February 9, 2007

Here are a few thousand more Google results, this time for a search for '"public library" "strategic plan" vision mission goals objectives.' The first page of results, at least, appear to be what you're looking for. Using the filetype operator to limit the search to .pdf, or .doc, might effectively narrow the results. Additionally, you could use DownThemAll, or another similar downloading tool, to download all the linked .pdfs from that page to a single directory, then sort them by size and read the smallest file. That's a wasteful, brute-force, machine-based way to find an especially short one.

I'd imagine that these kinds of Google tips are the sort of things that a library student would already know, so I'm curious--did you ask your professor if she was okay with your research methods, or are you just assuming? Because, if I recall correctly, when I had a similar assignment, it included finding the plan. After all, this is exactly the kind of question that people ask librarians for help with.
posted by box at 6:23 AM on February 9, 2007

I was going to suggest our library's strategic plan (only 5 pages when I preview it!), but it was the top hit on jessamyn's search and the second on box's so you've probably already seen it :-). I guess a lot of people must link to it as an example if is shows up that high in the the search results; that doesn't necessarily mean i'ts good, but at least it's not 34 pages (what on earth can they have put in that monster that was worth taking that much space over?)
posted by Quinbus Flestrin at 10:23 AM on February 9, 2007