I've had quite an interesting day today.  I volunteered my services to sit on a focus group on Improving our Planning and Performance with my service of Education, Learning and Leisure. Libraries fall into the learning and leisure part and when it comes to planning we don't have a huge amount of dealings with the other departments within our service.  As soon as I signed up for it panic set in as I wondered what I'd done!

So today we had our first meeting today and must say it went very well.  It was great to work with colleagues from other departments and realise when it comes to planning and performance there is quite a lot of common ground.  The tools we use to measure performance and to carry out self evaluation are different but we all have the same problem of being measured by book issues/exam results/bums on seats which really doesn't begin to reflect the service we provide, whether that be in libraries or schools.

The most important thing is the impact we have on peoples lifes.  If we can make a significant difference to 1 person and improve their life for the better then surely we are doing something right and our job is worthwhile.  We need to be concentrating on gathering this evidence as well as the stats than can be generated from our LMS.  In my opinion this type of feedback is far more valuable in justifying our existance and showing just how important libraries are to so many people.