Emily is right, Garfield County Libraries can and should be proud of the work that their Youth Librarians do reaching out to our community. Our Summer Reading program is VERY successful at reaching a large percentage of a population in our community. I believe if we were to ask the taxpayers of our County what they would like to see us do, one of the things at the top of the list would be to foster a love of reading and learning in children.
One important part of the hypothetical situation that I outlined regarding story time earlier this week is that we are talking about INDIVIDUAL children. How many different children attend story time in a given time period? For example, if 10 children attend story time every week and there are 52 story times per year that would be 520 attendees. If it is the SAME children every week attending we have only reached 10 children in our community – not 520. 10 is a much smaller percentage of our target market than 520.
So the next step in determining if a program is REALLY reaching your target market or not is to determine what percentage of your population in Rifle is preschool children. Then determine how many INDIVIDUAL children are attending story time. What percentage of the preschoolers is this? If it is less than 50% can we say we are being effective in doing what our community has asked us to do? Are we using taxpayer money in an appropriate way?
I am certainly not advocating change for the sake of change – change is way to painful, difficult and time consuming to do it for no reason at all. But to change a program or process so it is more effective is the only way to be successful and to survive. If by taking our wonderful story times on the road we were able to reach more than 50% of the preschoolers in our community we should think about this type of “change”. Also it is important to remember that to add a program we must often take away from somewhere else. I am sure all the youth librarians would agree that they are very, very busy and to just keep adding programs without taking away other less effective and time consuming duties would just not work.
Mindy
