What's Good? Describing Your Public Library's Effectiveness

This workbook explains how to define what various constituents connected with a public library want it to do and what doing these things well means in qualitative terms. The book aims to define effectiveness for the public library and to provide guidelines for assessing the library's effectiveness and communicating this to stakeholders. The eight chapters address the following topics: (1) organizational effectiveness; (2) how to gauge effectiveness; (3) the steps that the public library field has taken to improve the ways of assessing and communicating effectiveness, including strategic planning, measurement, personnel appraisal, and budgeting; (4) key characteristics of the public library and how these characteristics might affect the way library managers depict its effectiveness; (5) the major results of "The Public Library Effectiveness Study"; (6) the AMPLE (A Model of Public Library Effectiveness) framework by which a manager may plan a program of assessing public library effectiveness; (7) using AMPLE to communicate with a library's constituent groups; and (8) summary or the major arguments of the book. The AMPLE worksheet is found in the appendices, and a bibliography is included. (JLB)