What Attract People to Go to the Public Library - Research Paper Example

What Attract People to Go to the Public Library Introduction Planning and evaluation have been major concerns for public libraries since at least the l960s, when the Public Library Association (PLA) began sponsoring the development of what has become a set of tools to help public libraries (McClure, Owen, Zweizig, Lynch, & Van House, 2003, Pahnour, Bellassai, & DeWath, 2005; Van House, Lynch, McClure, Zweizig, & Rodger, 2003, Walter, 1999). In the current economic climate, with many libraries making substantial service reductions to accommodate budget cuts, libraries must look more carefully than ever at their priorities and performance. Planning and evaluation address both internal and external needs (Childers & Van House, 2001). Internally, they help library management to set priorities, design programs and services, and allocate resources. Externally, the public library has to explain its mission continually and demonstrate its value to the community to justify its tax support. Public sector organizations have a particularly complex relationship with their environments because, unlike private enterprise, their services are only indirectly tied to revenues. Literature Review Public libraries are both unique from and similar to one another. The tension between uniqueness and similarity is critical to understanding planning and evaluation in public libraries and the uses of the PLA tools. Forces for Uniqueness among Public Libraries The PLA planning manual (McClure et al., 2003), the measurement manual (Van House et al., 2003), and the children’s services measurement manual (Walter, 1999) take a goal-based approach to planning and organizational effectiveness that stresses the uniqueness of each library and the need to respond to local conditions. These publications encourage each library to develop a mission, goals, and objectives suited to its community; to design appropriate operations and services; and to assess its progress toward its objectives, all in the context of its unique conditions. Four major forces tend to cause uniqueness across public libraries. The combined result of these forces is centripetal public libraries will tend to differ from one another as the result of a cumulation of local needs and decisions. The first force is the needs of the community as diagnosed by the library staff and local political decision makers. No two communities are exactly alike, so neither will be their information and library needs. The second is the library’s resources, culture, and history. Organizations, especially in the public sector, change incrementally. Each develops a culture and market position that tend to be stable. In public sector organizations, services attract client groups that resist changes that threaten their favorite services. The lack of a market test-services do not generate revenues to support themselves-makes it relatively easy to add services but difficult to discontinue them. The result is a tendency toward organizational accretion: the addition of new services but not the elimination of old ones. The third factor is politics: what the local community wants and will pay for and its assessment of the return on its public investment as expressed through the political process. The final force is professional culture: the independent judgment of the staff concerning community needs and appropriate services and operations. Professionals expect to exercise a large degree of autonomy in decision making and in the service function. The power of the individual service provider to define organizational actions and services is a major distinguishing feature of service organizations (Hansenfeld, 2004). Forces for Similarity Although the PLA approach stresses the uniqueness of each public library, the unstated assumption is that this uniqueness exists within a larger domain within which public libraries are similar to one another-hence their ability to use common planning methods, role statements, and measures of output. Among organizations staffed by professionals, a major source of similarity is the staff members’ identification with their profession; this association tends to unify their definitions of the organization’s mission, services, and operations and of their own roles and tasks. In libraries, this unity comes from a common educational background and from socialization to the norms and values of the profession. Shared goals are based on agreement about what needs to be done. Such agreements are socially constructed and are based on shared vision and values (Wilson, 2005) or mental models (Senge, 2006). A major part of professional education is designed to instill these visions, values, and models. A second source of similarity is the uncertainty of organizational action. Managers hypothesize, in effect, about causality when designing operations and services: they choose actions that they conjecture will meet their goals. Library managers must identify unstated (and often unrealized) needs, invent useful services, predict demand, and design effective services. The primary source of information about all these is the library’s past experience and that of others. Organizations tend to copy and adapt one another’s successes. A third source of similarity for public sector organizations may be the evaluation process itself. Evaluation is based on expectations and information. An evaluation judgment consists of comparing perceived organizational performance with expected performance. Evaluation requires a referent, a basis for deciding what is good (Cameron & Whetten, 2004). The community holds some general expectations of public sector organizations, such as efficiency, equity, and freedom from corruption. Beyond these general expectations, however, the public and local decision makers may be uncertain about what to expect from the public library. A major source of expectations about local government operations is similar jurisdictions. In determining whether the library is providing the right services, and enough of them, at a reasonable cost, local decision makers often look to similar jurisdictions. In addition, the availability of a service in one jurisdiction may create demand in another as members of the public learn of a potentially useful service and ask for it from their own library. In sum, the experiences of other libraries influence both the library staff and local decision makers in making decisions about their local library. The result is a tendency for libraries to converge on a similar set of choices about services and operations, especially the libraries in neighboring or “similar” jurisdictions. The result of these forces for both uniqueness and for similarity across public libraries is a tension that is evident in the PLA planning and evaluation tools. Libraries are encouraged to think of themselves as unique but to use a uniform set of roles and measures. Finally, library managers may argue for individual organizational differences, although they and their funders continually compare their libraries to those in similar communities. Evaluation and Comparison Library managers compare their libraries to those in similar jurisdictions both for their own decision making and for managing the expectations of their resource providers. Similarity may be defined on any of a number of characteristics. Most commonly, these include geographical proximity, population size, and demographic composition. The Public Library Data Service (PLDS) (Public Library Association, annual) collects data on library finances, resources, community size and demographics, use, output measures from Van House et al. (2003), and role choices from McClure et al. (2003). That the PLDS chooses to include these data implies that these are the dimensions that its designers believe likely to be relevant for similarity/uniqueness judgments and for which data are available. Demographics and resources are obvious bases for similarity. Output measures can be used in two ways: to identify similar libraries based on their performance or to compare the performance of libraries defined as similar based on other dimensions. Libraries that are similar on demographics and resources may, nevertheless, differ in their mission, goals, and objectives and would be expected to differ on their performance. The PLDS allows libraries to report their choices from among the service roles described by McClure et al. (2003) as a way of describing differences in libraries’ missions. An important question is how useful are the roles for defining similar libraries. The purpose of this article is to use data from the Public Library Effectiveness Study (PLES) to examine the PLDS roles and their usefulness in evaluating effectiveness. The purpose of this article is to examine the roles described in PIanning and Role Setting for Public Libraries (McClure et al., 2003) and reported in the PLDS for their usefulness in evaluating effectiveness. The article addresses four questions: Which roles are chosen the most often? Can we distinguish among libraries based on their role choices? Do libraries with different role choices perform differently? Can performance differences form an empirical basis for role definitions? The study examined the roles chosen by the libraries in the sample, clustered libraries with similar role choices, and compared the performance of libraries in the different role clusters. The overarching question was whether libraries with different role profiles differ on their performance. The role statements may be useful for purposes other than evaluation. For example, libraries report that discussion about roles is useful to educate organizational members to their library’s mission. The question here is not whether the roles are of any use at all, but rather, how helpful are they for describing subsets of libraries for evaluation purposes? Methodology The data for the present study are from a survey of librarians in the 84 sample libraries. In each library, four public service librarians and four managers, including the library director, were surveyed. In other parts of the study, other constituent groups were included, but only the librarian subjects participated in the part of the study described here. Respondents were given a summary description of each role and asked to rate the importance of each role in the library’s current program of services on a scale from 0 (least important) to 3 (most important). An inspection of the survey responses showed considerable differences among librarians within libraries as to what they believed their library’s current roles to be. Therefore, in this study the director’s role ratings were assigned to each library on the premise that this person has the greatest authority and broadest perspective. In public libraries, as noted above, the professionals exercise considerable autonomy in determining library operations. Many public libraries are geographically dispersed organizations-branch systems so that branch staff activities are difficult to monitor and control. In service organizations, a major part of the organization’s output consists of a direct, unobservable interaction between the individual staff member and the client, for example, reference service. Differences in role choices among the librarians within a library, if they exist, suggest inconsistencies in the staff’s definition of organizational mission and priorities that are a serious cause for concern, but such analyses are beyond the scope of this study. What is notable is that a lack of agreement on role priorities could (1) seriously interfere with the library’s performance and (2) affect respondents’ evaluations of their library’s performance. The multiple constituencies’ approach to effectiveness posits that different constituent groups will have different expectations and, therefore, different evaluations of an organization’s performance. The implication of this disagreement on role choices is that even among organizational members differing priorities will be reflected in evaluation judgments. A list of 61 potential indicators of library effectiveness was derived from the literature, interviews, and survey pretests. Library performance was assessed by asking librarian respondents to rate their library’s performance on each indicator on a scale from 1 (low) to 5 (high). The result is a subjective assessment of library performance. Although objective measures of library performance are desirable, these were precluded by the lack of comparable data from a large number of libraries on a sufficient range of library performance measures. The use of subjective assessments by organizational participants is common in organizational effectiveness research: Cameron (2002) and Jobson & S&neck (2003) relied on subjective assessments by organizational members for the same reasons. Factor analysis was used to collapse the list into 13 dimensions of public library performance, as described in Van House & Childers (2001) and reported in Table 1. Performance ratings are based on a combination of information and expectations: an observer judges how well an organization performs relative to his or her expectations based on whatever information she or he has about performance. Librarians with the same information for the same library but different role choices and different expectations are likely to evaluate its performance differently. Therefore the director’s performance ratings were used as the library’s ratings. Findings Role Choices For the roles to be useful in differentiating among libraries, the libraries must differ sufficiently in their role choices. Table 2 shows considerable uniformity among the most highly rated roles: Reference Library and Popular Materials Library were given the highest importance ratings by over 90% of the library directors. Preschoolers’ Door to Learning was also highly rated. There is a gap before the next most popular role. (Respondents were allowed to write in additional role choices, which 69 of 585 librarian respondents did. The new roles, however, did not suggest any common roles that had been overlooked.) The most popular roles are reassuringly predictable: providing reference service and popular materials are two of the public library’s traditional functions. Then, much less popular than these two but more popular than those that follow, comes Preschoolers’ Door to Learning. This is a less traditional public library function, but it seems to be growing in importance. However, many librarians told the authors that they have redefined this role as Children’s Door to Learning, which is one of the public library’s key enduring functions. If respondents made this same translation, then the high ranking of this role is predictable. The next set of roles combines new, untraditional roles with some that are not particularly new but less common. These results from directors are consistent with, but a little different from, the rankings from all librarians (including directors) reported in Table 3. The biggest difference is Formal Education Support, which 77% of all librarians, but only 28% of the directors, gave a “3.” A likely explanation is the difference between consumption and control. Library management’s priorities for services may not reflect the uses actually made by the public. A frequent topic of debate in public libraries is the library’s role in formal education support as a homework center for children or in support of post secondary education. The library may not make formal educational support a priority for collection development, but students generally use the library for that purpose, nevertheless. Public services librarians may reflect in their answers the use that the public actually makes of the library, whereas directors may be reporting the library’s intentional priorities. Given the non empirical origins of the roles, one may question whether the role statements are independent of one another or whether there is redundancy among them. Factor analysis uses similarities in variable values to reduce a set of variables to a smaller number of more general, underlying dimensions. The assumption of factor analysis is that if the value of variable A is always closely associated with that of variable B, then they may both represent the same underlying construct C. Although in assigning roles to libraries the researchers only used the directors’ responses, this was not necessary in the factor analysis. For factor analysis, the researchers were interested not in which roles belong to each library but in which roles tend to hang together in the assessment of respondents. Because factor analysis is better with more cases rather than fewer, the responses of all librarians who had answered the role questions were used. Table 4 reports the factor analysis results. The criterion used for determining the number of factors was the number of eigenvalues greater than 1.0. Factor loadings equal to or greater than .4 are usually considered significant. Two factors explained 46% of the observed variance in role ratings. The first factor can be characterized as the less common public library roles. Community Activity and Community Information Center are relatively new public library roles. Generally, only the strongest libraries aspire to be a Research Center. Preschoolers’ Door to Learning, as already noted, may be a more or a less traditional role depending on how closely the respondent stays to the definition given in the questionnaire ( McClure et al., 2003). The second factor is composed of more universal roles. Popular Materials and Reference Library were the two most commonly chosen roles, and Formal Education Support and Independent Learning Center both address the library’s long-standing educational role. What the factor analysis suggests is that for these 585 librarians two major dimensions of public library mission are tapped by the eight standardized role statements. These can be labelled traditional versus less traditional or common versus less common. With only two factors and with little variation among libraries in the traditional, common roles, the role statements are of limited usefulness for distinguishing libraries’ missions. Discussion Public libraries evidence considerable uniformity in their choice of roles, with the roles that are historically associated with public libraries emerging as favorites. These may be considered more prototypical public library roles, more central to the current concept of the public library. In the tension between uniqueness and similarity, public libraries tend to be similar in their emphasis on these roles and more unique in their emphasis on the others. Of course, the use of a standard set of role statements biases this analysis in the direction of similarity, a different approach, one that constrained the libraries’ choices less, would be needed to look more closely at issues of uniqueness across libraries. The findings are consistent with the factor analysis on role ratings, which identified two major dimensions of public library mission represented by the eight standard roles: traditional and less traditional, or common and less common. With only two factors and with little variation among libraries in the traditional, common roles, the role statements are of some but limited use in distinguishing libraries by their missions. A larger sample of libraries might have resulted in more role dimensions and more differentiation among them. Clustering the libraries by role choices, the libraries in this sample could be differentiated into one group serving smaller populations focusing on the more popular roles and another serving larger populations aspiring to a greater variety of roles. Both clusters placed high emphasis on traditional roles. The conclusion from the role factor analysis and clustering is that public libraries are distinguished not by their relative emphasis on each role but by the extent to which they go beyond the traditional roles. The picture that emerges is of a set of organizations with a common core, the traditional roles, supplemented to varying degrees by other roles. The performance differences across the role clusters show that the more ambitious group tends to rate its performance higher on more than half the indicators tested. One possible explanation is response bias: some respondents may have tended to answer both role and performance questions using the higher end of the scale on each question. This explanation cannot be ruled out. However, that the more ambitious libraries (or respondents) also serve larger population suggests not response bias, which should be randomly distributed, but two distinct groups of libraries that differ on population sire, service aspirations, and accomplishments. One might reasonably expect a library serving a smaller population to be more modest in both its aspirations and accomplishments. Attempts to develop role definitions empirically from the performance data were of only limited success. Various approaches to developing performance profiles based on the performance ratings failed to yield interpretable results.The limited size of the sample-beginning with 585 librarians in 84 libraries, reduced to 70 libraries for which complete, usable data were available on all the variables used in these analyses-requires caution in the interpretation of these findings. A larger sample would likely have resulted in more, and more highly differentiated, clusters of libraries and possibly more role factors. This analysis was based on the public library roles previously defined by McClure et al. (2003). As time passes, the applicability of these roles to current public library contexts and services becomes more questionable. The common core of library services described by the roles Reference Library and Popular Materials Library will probably remain. This study used only subjective assessments of library performance because of the difficulty of obtaining comparable objective data describing a wide range of library activity for a large enough number of organizations. Conclusion Public libraries engage in a common core of activities, with the differences among libraries appearing at the margin, in their decisions about the extent to which to supplement common roles with less traditional ones. Libraries serving larger populations complement the core roles with less traditional ones at no increase in per capita funding they also generally perform better on most indicators. This suggests that larger libraries may be more effective. More finely serenity role descriptions would help to identify differences among libraries and the relationship between role choices and performance. Relating performance to role choice is complex but will be increasingly necessary with growing emphasis on performance and accountability in the public sector. For this, better descriptions of library roles or activities, more finely differentiated and more responsive to the rapid change facing all information organizations, and better data on library performance, will be needed. References Baker, Sharon L., & Lancaster, F. Wilfrid. (1999). The library services (2nd ed.). Arlington, VA: Information Resources Press. Cameron, Rim S. (2002). 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