Our team is excited to start work on a new long-term project. We’ll be spending the next nine months engaging the community in a series of surveys,discussions and conversations about the future of the city’s libraries.
As Richmond Public Library prepares to engage in long-range strategic planning, they felt it was essential to do some serious homework first. In the coming months, five big pieces of work will happen:
- A series of community conversations will be facilitated by the Library of Virginia
- Individual interviews will be conducted with key library stakeholders
- Demographic data will be gathered for each of the nine libraries
- Circulation data will be generated for each of the nine libraries
- Patrons will be asked to participate in an online or paper survey, or a face-to-face interview
In July, Floricane will bring all of the individuals handling each of these initiatives together with other library staff and board members. We’ll use the data gathered, and the collective wisdom of the group, to identify a set of strategic drivers important to the future of the library.
After we do some additional work in the summer, we’ll work with the library staff to convene and facilitate community conversations designed to build on the emerging strategic drivers. A final report will go to the library board in the fall, and set the stage for long-range planning in 2015.