Applying the Balanced Scorecard in Libraries

For many years libraries were struggling from the lack of formal performance measures that determine libraries’ success or the effect of their services on patrons. Many libraries were basing their performance measurements on informal feedbacks from users. Even though libraries succeeded in developing understandable statements of their missions and goals, there was no relationship between the mission statements and the actual services offered by libraries in order to assess the effectiveness of these services, and align them with the strategic plans or mission statements. The failure in measuring library services affects employees, budget, and the community served by the library. Library employees cannot improve their future performance when their current performance is not measurable, nor can they find out problems, and develop programs that lead to service excellence in the future. Moreover, the library application for grants is more likely to be rejected if its administrators are unable to justify how the money spent benefits the community.
The balanced scorecard (BSC) is a “strategic planning and management system (Kaplan, 1992)” that looks not only to the financial outcomes of an organization in order to assess its performance, but on different other internal and external perspectives. It was developed in the early 1990’s in Harvard by Professor Robert Kaplan and David Norton and was implemented mainly in financial and for-profit organizations before it was successfully adopted by not-for-profit organizations. The balanced scorecard orbits around an organization’s mission and goals and assesses its performance from different perspectives. Kaplan and Norton defined four perspectives: the customer perspective, the learning and growth perspective, the internal process perspective, and the financial perspective.
In the past, libraries focused on the internal process perspective (cost, time, quality) to measure their activities and services and implement change. Yet, a big shift from the internal process perspective measurements to the customer perspective measurements (how much the customer is
satisfied by the service) was noticed in the last two decades. However, the implementation of the balanced scorecard in libraries did not occur until the early 21st century where many libraries, NGO’s, and governmental agencies took the initiative in applying BSC in their institutions. One successful experience took place at the University of Virginia library that developed a plan to implement the balanced scorecard in 2001.
Jim Self, the director of management information services at the University of Virginia library, stated that the balanced scorecard helped librarians to better control statistical operations by limiting the number of metrics between four and eight per perspective. Also, two targets for each metric were defined to measure achievements. Self believed that the “intelligibility” of the balanced scorecard allowed the library to assess its yearly performance by looking at the overall performance pie chart and by comparing charts of different perspectives in order to understand how well the library is doing and locate places that need improvements.
What steps should a library follow for applying the balanced scorecard?
1. The first step is in examining the library’s mission statement and reformulating it, if required, to make it as clear and simple as possible. The mission statement should be at the center of the balanced scorecard project. Then, a plan of work, relating the mission statement to the four perspectives of the BSC, should be drafted. Librarians must ask for example: what kind of financial changes do we need to realize the goal stated in the mission statement? Or what are the internal changes needed to increase staff performance? These questions will help defining the performance metrics for each perspective to be used for measuring the actual performance of the library.
2. The balanced scorecard project manager presents the performance metrics to all people involved in the project by organizing meetings with the public and the library managers. The objectives of these meetings are to create awareness of the goals of the BSC project and to gain support from people involved in the process.
3. The BSC project manager chooses a reasonable number of metrics for each perspective (3 to 6 metrics), ensures that the chosen metrics are measurable, and defines one or more targets for each metric. Different methods can be used to gather the data.
4. The performance metrics will be used to measure the performance of the library from different perspectives and stimulate employees and managers to think how the library should react in light of the gathered data, and the results must improve performance in the future.
5. The last step is to disseminate the findings to the concerned people including employees, managers, community, and funders. The distribution of the results has both internal and external values. It gives employees a clear idea about their actual performance and what it should be done to improve performance in the future. In addition, sharing the results with the public raises awareness of the library’s future services and plans within the community. In addition, the results will provide funders with exact figures on how the funds are used by the library and their effects on users.
The application of the balanced scorecard in libraries has proved to be very efficient since it is adaptable to any kind of organizations, easy to share and communicate the results with staff and community, and provides accurate evaluation of internal and external organizational performance from four different perspectives.

Acquisition of electronic resources: High cost and high usage

Acquisition librarians are facing changes in their traditional work duties with the emergence of electronic resources. Martha Whittaker discussed these new challenges that are facing acquisition librarians in the digital environment such as licensing, system requirements, compatibility, authentication, proxy servers, and interface design. However, the new changes in trends are not replacing the old way of managing the acquisition of print resources but they are adding on them more duties and skills that acquisition librarians should learn to successfully manage the new resources. The librarians’ knowledge of technology and contracting can help them to effectively escort and adapt to the rapid changes in the management routine of acquisition departments.
Witthaker detailed some of these challenges such as the changes in pricing and the relatively high prices of e-resources, the preservation requirements of e-resources, the absence of trusted methods to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of e-resources, the duty of librarians to specify their demand for suppliers, and the need for international standards for sharing purposes. Witthaker also stressed the need for librarians to make these resources available to users through tools that they already user so they can be easily accessible and consequently highly utilized. These tools can be the social networking website such as Facebook, My Space, and others. Witthaker also talked about the need for librarians to get full access to the databases they purchase and to reach agreements with suppliers in order to customize these databases according to their users’ need. Witthaker introduced some trends in the acquisition of e-resources such as: the electronic resources management systems (ERMS) which is a software to manage digital resources especially in acquisition department, Open access and institutional repositories (IR) where a real problem exist which is the difference between licensing and owning electronic products, assessment tools and software like COUNTER, and finally electronic books that seemed to be not very practical in the way they have been used.
With no doubt, the big impact of electronic resources required libraries to change their work routine and to adopt new trends that help them in successfully managing these resources. Electronic resources are very expensive and librarians should make sure that they are highly used to be cost-effective. They key to success is to know how to promote these resources, in other words librarians should know how to acquire and provide the right resource to the right user with the right tool. For this reason librarians should create their own assessment tools and to analyze usage numbers in relation to their users’ needs. Yet, the use of social networking services to promote and provide digital resources cannot be very useful since people have the tendency to differ their personal and social life from work or study. Also, the promotion can be very expensive in relation to usage.

Whittaker, Martha (10/11/2008). "The Challenge of Acquisitions in the Digital Age". Portal (Baltimore, Md.) (1531-2542), 8 (4), p. 439.

Self-censorship: book banners in disguise

Censored and challenged books have been in the spotlight for long time. Intellectual freedom is one of the hottest issues in our libraries today. Many debates were initiated about the librarians’ role in promoting intellectual freedom and ensuring that every book reaches its audience. Self-censorship is an informal type of censorship where librarians hide behind budgets limitations and other reasons to prevent some books from reaching the shelves.
Debra Lau Whelan interviewed authors of challenged young adult novels and librarians who experienced censorship of books in their libraries to explain the challenges and difficulties that are faced by both authors and librarians involved in collection development and selection of materials. Barry Lyga, the author of Boy Toy said that some bookstores are placing the novel in the adult section if buying it at all, while librarians who loved the book are not adding it to the collection because they are afraid of users’ complaints. Whelan termed this kind of censorship as “dirty little secret.” She describes self-censorship as a secret where librarians never admit that they are practicing it. The ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom reported that only one out of five challenged books cases are discovered because self-censorship cases are hard to identify. In a survey conducted by the School Library Journal, 70% of librarians answered that they won’t buy some youth books that they think will provoke reactions from the parents’ side, while 23% replied that their personal ideas play a role in ignoring certain books. Pat Scales, the president of the Association of Library Services to Children, believes that librarians who practice self-censorship tend to cover their actions by hiding the real reason for not buying some books behind budget or space problems. The censored subjects are not sexual only but offensive language, violence, homosexuality, racism, and religion as well. In addition, authors of youth adult novels are affected by the public pressure. Many of them revealed that they changed some titles and omitted words from their books because they want to avoid headaches. Scales recommended giving young people the access to any book because they are able to adjust themselves if they have the freedom to do so. She also recommended for librarians to make sure that they have written selection policies in order to protect themselves.
Intellectual freedom is protected by the U.S. first amendment. Yet, librarians are standing between two evils, the complaints of the community as a reaction of adding a challenged book to the library’s collection from one side, and the fear from getting fired or sued if they cannot comply with the first amendment’s requirements from the other side. As recommended by Scales, the best solution for librarians is to adopt selection policies that reduce their personal intervention in selection decisions and protect them from future litigations.

Whelan, Debra (2009). "A Dirty Little Secret." School library journal (New York, N.Y.) (0362-8930), 55 (2), p. 27.

Managing Information on the Web

The gigantic amount of information that is produced everyday on the web in different formats (blogs, websites, multimedia…) requires more attention from librarians than print resources whose vendors and agents are known and their collection development strategies are very well established. Therefore, collection development librarians are expected to get additional skills in order to acquire, evaluate, preserve, and provide access to these resources. Librarians should use traditional selection skills that they already have and should learn other skills such as technology which they need to successfully locate and identify web resources. The most challenging step is to find relevant information on the web. Librarians involved in selection on the web should be subject specialists because no controlled vocabularies are available on the web and librarians are expected to use their own knowledge to find useful and authoritative information. Also, technology skills are very important because information is available in different formats and websites are built by different programming languages (HTML, PHP, JAVA…). Not all websites on the internet are indexed by search engines since some websites won’t allow crawling software, such as the one used by Google and other search engines, to index their contents therefore these websites cannot be located by browsing search engines. For this reason, librarians should use different strategies to locate these websites that they can be highly relevant sometimes. The evaluation of information and resources available online is very crucial. Users in general and students is specific have the tendency to trust everything they found on the internet and to take it as face value. The job of librarians is to evaluate web-resources and to make sure that they recommend authoritative information only. The internet includes many open-access resources yet not all of them are valuable, librarians should transfer the selection skills that they master in the print world to the web, and to provide authoritative, recent, and trusted resources to end-users. The preservation of resources on the web is also important since electronic information is not permanent. Websites are always changing and information can easily disappear. Few libraries are using their own crawling software to surf websites according to a specific subject, to index their materials, and to save them on servers so they can be preserved permanently. Yet, this practice is not very familiar since it requires a lot of work to locate web resources and to index them in a searchable way, also the storage space required to save these resources is very high. Finally, information located on the web will be useless if it cannot be accessed. Therefore, librarians are required to provide access to this information and make it available to the public. Metadata librarians are highly demanded these days to describe the content of web-resources and make them searchable. Librarians tend to gather web-resources in subject guides with a description of each resource (metadata) and make them available on the library’s website. For those who use crawling software, information can be searched by keywords yet the searching strategies are not very well developed. In conclusion, collection development librarians are expected to acquire technology skills, and to develop new strategies in addition to traditional strategies for the selection of information on the web. In the web world, librarians can only rely on their skills while in the print world agents and vendors are considered a major help for librarians in collection development and selection of materials.

Budget Reduction and Solutions

During the last couple years, many libraries have been facing budget reduction or budget stability in the best cases, while serials subscriptions, in print or electronic, have been rising sharply. Print books prices have increased too but in a slower manner. This fact implies that more money will be taken from the print books’ budget to cover serials subscriptions. This will eventually lead to a weaker print collection in the future if cuts decisions were made arbitrary. A plan is required in order to base selection decisions on it. The first step is to conduct a study in order to understand circulation statistics of books, usage of print and electronic serials, and usage of e-books, and to identify areas in the collection that do not support our curriculum. A survey can also be conducted to determine users’ preference for the formats, print or e-books, and what are the heavily used databases. Since single print journals subscriptions are more costly than those available electronically in packages, it is eligible to find duplications and overlaps between print and electronic journals and to discontinue subscriptions to print journals that are available electronically. This will save a good amount of money that can be used to select more books. Also, some print-only journals that are rarely used can be discontinued after consulting with faculty members and the needed articles can be requested through interlibrary loan. Concerning electronic journals subscriptions, it is highly recommended to rely more on consortia such as MEL for general databases since it is cost-effective, and to limit individual subscriptions to specialized databases only that are needed to support our curriculum. It is highly important to consult with many vendors before subscribing to a particular database since some databases are offered by different vendors but with lower prices. In addition, a “patron-driven” selection model is the best way to save money and ensure high usage for both print and electronic books. For print books, patron-driven model can be established by deciding either to buy or to borrow books requested through interlibrary loan. The price, publisher, and date are the main criteria for making such decision. In the electronic world, many e-books vendors provide the ability to add MARC records of their e-books to the library’s catalog, the library deposit an amount of money with the vendor, once the full-text of the book is requested by a user, its price will be deducted from the deposit and the book will be purchased by the library. By using patron-driven models the library can make sure that only books that will be used are purchased. This strategy will save a big amount of money usually spent on books that have never been used. It is also recommended that the library purchase e-books versions of text books since they are very expensive and highly used. E-books will guarantee simultaneous usage with relatively lower prices. Also, in some disciplines such as computer science, print books are expensive and their life span is very short since they become obsolete very fast, therefore some vendors offer e-books databases that provide books for couple years and replace them with newer editions one they are published. These databases will save the library a good amount of money and shelf space as well. Finally, a good approval plan is very useful since a fixed amount of money will be spent on books carefully selected and duplication will be reduced to a minimum. Also, the fact that books will be received shelf-ready will save the processing cost and time needed for books to be available on shelves.

WorldCat: Can it be the best collection evaluation tool?

Many collection evaluation methods were used in the past, yet none of them can be considered highly reliable. The most popular technique was the checklist method which consists of comparing the library holdings to a particular bibliography. However, the limitations of this method overcome its advantages since the generated numbers are difficult to interpret, the list can be outdated, and the items on the list may not match the curriculum of the institution in a particular subject area. Other methods include citation analysis, surveys, and circulation studies.
Jennifer McClure employed a relatively new method based on the WorldCat database to evaluate the effectiveness of three foreign approval plans for romance languages (French, Spanish, and Italian) at the University of Alabama libraries. This method consists of comparing a library’s collection in a particular subject to other libraries’ collections available through WorldCat. It is very similar to the checklist method, yet it has more advantages such as the ability to limit the search by date, genre, form, language, and audience. Also, WorldCat has the capacity to compare a library’s collection to different libraries at the same time which make the comparison list more exhaustive. McClure stated that the goal of the assessment project is to compare the three approval plans separately to the universe of possible acquisitions represented by the collections of four prominent universities. Some technical flaws appeared during the search process. The search by LC call numbers was problematic since the truncated search generated items that are not required and excluded other required records. The results were surprising. Among the three collections, the library owns the highest percentage in the least important language in the library’s collection development policy and vice versa. Yet, McClure discovered the importance of the first 100 titles retrieved from WorldCat and arranged by the number of holdings. McClure concluded that these titles represent the core collection of the curriculum and should be purchased by the library.
The effectiveness of WorldCat as an assessment tool is derived from its strong collection as a union catalog that contains almost every published book in any discipline. This characteristic makes any checklist generated from WorldCat exceptionally thorough. Also, the easiness of comparison of library holdings in a specific field to many other libraries within a reasonable time frame is another advantage of WorldCat. Yet, as in the classic checklist method, it is both difficult to interpret the results, and challenging to determine if the collections of the comparison libraries are similar or close to the library compared.

McClure, Jennifer (2009). "Collection Assessment through WorldCat". Collection management (0146-2679), 34 (2), p. 79.

Why e-books are not popular?

When e-books technology appeared in the 1990s many publishers and experts declared the beginning of the end of print books. Yet, after two decades print books are still in the market while e-books are facing some challenges.
Cynthia Gregory, the Head of Electronic Resources at the College of Mount St. Joseph’s Archbishop Alter Library, conducted a survey to study the attitude of undergraduate students toward e-books. Gregory explained that there are 3 commercial models of e-books: web-based, audio e-books, and device-based. The e-books market shifted from a focus on device-based to web-based models because they are more convenient for college and university libraries. Gregory indicated that after adding a number of e-books to the library’s catalog their usage increased remarkably, yet students’ feedbacks were always negative about the format. The questionnaire included questions related to the participants’ computer knowledge, to make sure that this variable will not negatively affect the study. The survey results showed that 75% of participants are aware of e-books but only 39% used them. Students indicated that they do not use e-books for many reasons which include awareness, preference for print, eyestrain, lack of need, and ease of use. Those who used e-books said that they used them for assignments and reference, only a few stated that they use e-books for leisure readings. Gregory concluded that e-books should continue to exist in academic libraries since patrons have different learning styles and preferences. She also stressed the importance of shared acquisition of electronic resources, and the importance of communication between libraries and vendors in order to provide the best services for patrons.
It is obvious from the results above that the use of e-books among students is attached to a need; this was also reflected by the switch of e-books market from a focus on device-based to web-based e-books. These findings imply that neither print nor electronic books would become obsolete but every type has its own market. While print books are the best format for leisure readings, e-books are used for specific needs. Like any other product e-books have advantages and inconveniences. Publishers of e-books have to focus on what aspects of the technology the people prefer and to emphasize on them. But it is totally wrong to approach e-books technology as a replacement of traditional print books.

Gregory, Cynthia (2008). ""But I Want a Real Book": An Investigation of Undergraduates' Usage and Attitudes toward Electronic Books". Reference and user services quarterly , 47 (3), p. 266.