The Importance of Evaluation: How to Check In on New Services

At any given time, many of us who are children’s librarians are experts in multi-tasking, from implementing weekly programs to adding new services that we would like to try or addressing patron requests for more.  It is also easy to keep saying yes to more until you get to the point when it is time to start doing and that can very easily begin to get out of hand and eventually lead to burnout.  Evaluation can help staff members get to the “why” something is important and help with our balancing act.  It helps identify needs, measure outcomes, and look at a bigger picture than daily library life.  It also gives you a valuable moment to pause instead of continuously adding more.

Last spring, my Children’s Services team was interested in adding Tonie kits to our library collection.  We had an interested staff member who wanted to research the project, create a proposal, and eventually take on the collection.  Research into our current circulation statistics showed that audiobooks and kits with books and a CD trended downward. Staff knew the benefits of having audiobooks available for kids, but we needed a better option.  What we found from listening to patrons is that many don’t have a CD player in their car or house, which is why we wanted to test out a Tonie kit so that anyone could check one out and have the player included. 

As the staff member got ready to purchase, this question came up multiple times. “Why aren’t we purchasing these districtwide?  They will obviously be a hit.”  By limiting a trial to one location and setting the time period to six months, we have been able to:

• Gauge the highs and lows of circulation.  While we have had mostly empty shelves throughout the trial, over the December holiday weeks, we have 13 kits on the shelf.  They are bulky and take up space so we learned that we need to be mindful of having enough space for the items over holidays.
• Work out the bugs.  Our kits have one Toniebox and 4 preloaded characters.  Would the characters disappear?  Would kids take them out and play with them like toys?  In 3 months, we have only had one character need replacing and it was because a dog ate it.  But we have now created a process for how parts get replaced. 
• Estimate a good collection size.  We started with 28 kits and all 28 were immediately checked out.  We were able to add 10 additional kits and now average 4 kits on the shelf.

We are halfway through our trial and circulation stats and patron feedback are giving us the idea that this trial will be expanded to other locations.  Taking the time to trial and evaluate has given us time to retool the project if it was needed.  It is also easier to put processes in place on a smaller scale rather than trying to figure things out as a large group, such as how to replace a character.

For more information about evaluation in public libraries and how you can get started, check out ALA’s Outcome Measurement Resources at https://www.ala.org/pla/data/outcomemeasurement.

Today’s blog post was written by Lisa Mulvenna on behalf of the Managing Children’s Services Committee. Lisa can be reached at lmulvenna [at] cmpl.org.

This post relates to ALSC Core Competencies I: Commitment to Client Group, II: Reference and User Services and IV: Collection Knowledge and Management.