The Strategic Planning Committee members spent the last week gathering and reading background documents we felt would prove useful to the planning process, looking at both the broad picture for libraries as well as our local context.
The Local Picture:
School District 205 is in the midst of their own strategic planning process. Much of their work is not yet available to us but the committee was able to look at preliminary figures on enrollment projections. These statistics will be very valuable as we identify who are users are, and will be in the future.
The City of Elmhurst is also working on a comprehensive plan. There is a lot of information available on the city web site, including an environmental scan. We also looked at the results of the 2006 Citizen Survey.
Elmhurst Park District published their comprehensive master plan in 2007. The Library owns a copy of this document. Not only is the final data useful to us but we also get a glimpse into the process the Park District went through in developing their plan.
Census data for Elmhurst was reviewed. The last census was in 2000.
Elmhurst Public Library circulation statistics were also examined, looking at patterns over the past five years.
Next week we plan to pull this data together into a “Snapshot” of the Elmhurst community as it is, and as it is projected to be in the future.
The Broader Picture:
We are scanning the available literature, as well as the Internet, gathering information on what other libraries are doing.
The OCLC Market Research team has published a number of reports that examine the significant issues and trends impacting libraries both now and in the future. These reports look at social, economic, and technological trends; how trends and innovation in information formats are creating new challenges and opportunities for librarians; and perceptions of libraries and information resources.
Exciting News!
We have been approached by Amy Clugg, a professor at Elmhurst College who teaches a marketing research class. Each term the class conducts a survey for a organization in town and they would like to do one for the library. The Committee will be meeting with Professor Clugg on February 27 to discuss what the library would like to learn from a survey. If you have any thoughts on this, please share them with one of the committee members.
Communications:
We are working to establish a library blog, accessible through our website, that will be used to communicate with both the staff and the community. Two different software packages are currently under consideration and we hope to have something set up soon. We will also make use of bulletin boards throughout the library, including a new one in the staff lounge where you will find notes on our meetings as well as a timeline.
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