On becoming essential: An agenda for quality in twenty-first century public libraries - Perspectives on Quality in Libraries

Library Trends, Wntr, 1996 by Glen E. Holt

ABSTRACT

Changes in the social and economic fabric of American life have prompted public libraries to develop services and programs that are more in tune with the needs of individuals and communities. These efforts have uniformly focused on improving quality, although quality is of necessity a moving target. Among the strategies that public libraries have employed to improve their quality and both meet and anticipate new markets are defining the organization's core values and mission, capitalizing on new user-friendly information technologies, defining the library as a visitor destination, and bringing a customer locus to staff training and development. The importance of partnerships with a wide variety of entities is discussed along with the need to ensure the security of library users as well as their right to privacy. The author also emphasizes the need for more effective public relations and marketing strategies and the importance of listening to the customer as keys to building an organization characterized by exemplary quality.

Taking Aim on Quality

Quality and Change

In public libraries, "quality" means little unless defined within the context of change. The chorus of an old song begins, "Love and marriage, love and marriage. They go together like a horse and carriage." The lyric represents the tightly-linked character of change and quality.

American public libraries are awash in change. The tide includes the globalization of information; a rapid succession of innovations in computing and networking; heightened competition for public funding; population changes, including aging of the citizenry, variations in family composition, and shifts in ethnic and racial composition; and increasing alternatives to public library services, including new methods of electronic retailing (Holt, 1992, pp. 10-12).

As the waves of change ebb and flow, quality is redefined again and again - by constituents, as they shift their demands for services and materials; by staff, through their willingness to lead and follow within an always-changing organization; and by boards and administrators, who must obtain the necessary funds and set policies to maintain optimum institutional health. Within this context, public library quality is a moving target.

Quality and Completeness

American quality movements tend to be faddish. They fade in and out of style almost as fast as the best-selling business-book authors who espouse them (Byrne, 1995). TQM (Total Quality Management) is one example. 1994 brought publication of the library field's first TQM book; it also was the year in which a team of management experts published Why TQM Fails and What to Do About It (Brown et al., 1994). And, even as former Special Library Association president Guy St. Clair (in press) published a volume advocating TQM in libraries, Ronen and Pass (1994) revealed that TQM has failed half the time in the industrial workplace for which it was invented, and Sherer (1994) wrote that most of the 4,500 hospitals which had invested heavily in TQM had seen no financial benefits from it. Business Week, meanwhile, reported that "spirituality" was the hot new workplace quality tool replacing TQM and other older management methodologies (Galen & West, 1995, pp. 82, 84-85).

Neither TQM nor any other quality methodology offers a quick fix for public library dysfunctions. Making an organization work better involves rebuilding its culture - and that requires a comprehensive effort.

Most quality movements fail, writes Crosby (1992), because they are narrow in their focus. Completeness of effort throughout the entire organization is the best strategy to achieve quality:

Completeness .... is not something that pours itself on command - it has to be dragged out of the bottle. Once it is ... available, it adds flavor and consistency to everything it touches, and its container is never empty. The purpose of Completeness is to avoid problems and guarantee success. There are three principles of completeness:

1. Cause employees to be successful. 2. Cause suppliers to be successful. 3. Cause customers to be successful. (Crosby, 1992, p. 19)

Crosby then defines success:

Let us consider what success means in an organization, whether it be profit or nonprofit oriented. We must think of this success in terms of achieving agreed upon objectives, all of which are measurable. Objectives such as steady growth, ... low employment turnover, a high level of employee voluntary participation, education programs that fit everyone's needs, a management succession plan that works, continuous new product and service development, active support from suppliers, community admiration, and happy and prosperous shareholders [for libraries, community constituents and other stakeholders]. (pp. 17-18)

To follow Crosby's admonition, public libraries will need to make a complete quality effort. To paraphrase Battle and Nayak (1994), all government agencies, including public libraries, should become exemplary rather than ordinary in every possible way.