Our performance
Libraries are more complicated than you might think.
We smile weakly at the jokes about spending our time "stamping books" - or the idea that we spend a lot of our time reading them! (we don't in work time)
In fact, we spend a most of our time serving our customers and doing lots of other things to make sure that we meet our two main objectives to provide a "comprehensive" and "efficient" library service.
While Library Services work within local government, in a real sense we operate more like a "not for profit" retail business and we share many common things with bookshops. The main differences are that we don't provide services based on whether they are "profitable" and we have collections of many items now unavailable elsewhere.
You might buy a cheap supermarket copy of a bestseller by an author like Jack Higgins, but those supermarkets will only stock a limited number of titles. If you want to read all of his books (especially the older copies no longer available) you can come to us.
There have been some negative reports about libraries recently, especially a Libri report predicting the end of libraries with this generation. Libraries are certainly changing, but the fundamental need is still there and will be for a long time.
It is difficult to imagine any time that a civilised society won't need some aspect of the services provided by a library, although some of the technological changes have, and will, have an impact. Until recently, it was very common for readers from the most active "reading" generation to borrow up to 10 light romances, crime or westerns each. That has changed dramatically as many of their sons and daughters read different types of books, use us more for study support, the Internet or local history.
Our targets
Our main and most important performance measures must always relate to how well we serve you. That is why most survey questions come under one of the following headings:
Are you happy with access and opening hours?
Have you found the stock and information you need?
Have staff served you well and competently
How happy are you with various aspects of the service?
Staff objectives
To help staff to see the areas we need to improve more clearly, we have put many of our concerns into the form of performance targets. You have a chance to see an internal staff document from 2003-4 here.
Library performance targets and results
A number of national studies of libraries and and library work are now available in Pdf form (a special compressed format that allows you to reader longer documents) on the Internet.