So many possible new projects at my new job. They need to be prioritised.

Often potential projects are solutions looking for problems. I’d like to spend some time finding the relevant problems, then measuring them against potential projects.

Here’s my ideas about how we can work out where to point my skills and energy – in no particular order. It probably works as a checklist for prioritising library work generally.

Too many babies Uploaded to Flickr on February 12, 2009 by PhotoBlackburn

1. Team decision – It needs to be a team decision, not just mine.

2. Mission – We need to align whatever we do to the mission of  the library and our councils.

3. Giving priority means giving time –  By employing me, a different skillset has come into the library but no extra hours. For me to spend x hours of my skills on new projects, x hours of existing projects need to be freed up – either done smarter, done to a different standard or stopped. Just deciding that a new project is a priority is not enough. We need to decide what else should be done differently in response.

4. User focus – Our users are the reason we get paid. The reason we do things is not our books, what other libraries are doing or other staff. We need to to focus on our users and their needs.

5. What if we look at it as a user problem ? Do our users have problems that we can solve with any of the projects? When talking about what needs to be done, can it be phrased as a user need, not a problem that I have as a librarian? So not “we pay for subscriptions to databases and need to encourage our users to use them more”…. but instead ask “is it too difficult for our users to find the best information we can provide?” . So not “we need more people to use the self-checkouts” but  asking “do users have their books issued as quickly and privately as they would like?”.

6. Know the visions – Each user has different vision for the library. Each staff member has a different vision for the library. These can be contradictory – and only sometimes be reconciled.  A noisy, high-energy space and a quiet, still space may not be able to exist in the same building.  Compare the vision of the librarians interviewed in the CNN article, The future of libraries, with or without books or the vision of the headmaster in the Boston Globe article Welcome to the library, Say goodbye to the books with the vision of people who made comments on the articles.  Sometimes one could toss a coin and be guaranteed to offend as many people as we please whichever option we take. This is where library science becomes an art and relies on experience and a good librarian’s radar.

dailypic 7/22: The business end of a nerf gun Uploaded to Flickr on July 23, 2009 by Jenica26

7. Get deeply local -We should identify what we offer that users cannot get online, in other libraries, or elsewhere – the deeply local – and use this to guide where we put our energies.

8. User demographics – If we are interested in replicating projects offered by other libraries, we should identify what is special about our users compared to other libraries’ users. For example,  it looks like 16% of the hits on our website are using Apple’s Safari browser,  whereas Safari only has 4.1% of the market share . I need to look more carefully at the source of the information, but maybe that has implications about future hardware we buy and maybe any computing classes.

9. Surpassing user expectations – Although we are paid to meet our users’ needs, I believe that we should aim to surpass expectations too. This is where research into library futures and increasing the tech skills of our staff may come in. If we know about tools that can make our users’ lives easier and if we can plan the type of library that will meet our users’ future needs,  then we will be serving them well. If asked, users probably would not have much idea of the future impact of e-books, but we do need to be thinking about these and be developing the skills to manage them.

10. Step back and fit it all together – Is it possible to step back and see disparate projects as part of the same overarching problem? For example, could cluttered noticeboards, databases not being used and a project to publish movies of the construction of the library all be seen as part of how we communicate with our users ? Would it be useful to sort out some principles and ideas about communicating with our users first and then maybe it would be much more obvious the directions the smaller projects should take?