The Business of Libraries (it isn’t what you’re thinking)
Where are all the ads for libraries?
I wrote this in my journal upon overhearing it at this morning’s workshop. It’s day 1 of the ALIA National Conference 2024 and I’m in Adelaide attending a workshop hosted by the wonderful Kyleigh Langrick, a highly skilled librarian with an MBA and over 20 years’ experience in the library sector. Prefaced with talking points that will no doubt become the recurrent themes of this year’s conference, we explored three simple yet effective tools libraries can borrow from the business world to build effective and successful strategies to overcome the challenging times we find ourselves in.
Libraryland is in crisis
The rate of technological change has increased exponentially, and many of the ‘future-focused’ tech solutions we’re only just starting to implement are already redundant. Budget constraints are worsening, with many of us competing for the same (and now smaller) pools of grant funding. The pandemic highlighted and worsened some of the social issues our frontline workers are handling, and in some cases, they’re getting burnt out and leaving the industry for better (safer) conditions. As leaders, we are overwhelmed by balancing all of these pressures on top of managing our own health and wellbeing, but thankfully, we have thinkers like Kyleigh poised to share their expertise and guide us through the storm.
We don’t need to be afraid of adopting tools from the business world — we should look to other industries, learn from profit-driven organisations and steal the best bits that are proven to work. This won’t turn us into ‘tech dudebros’ or turn libraries into bitcoin factories. I promise.
One of the major takeaways from today’s session was that I’d only ever done half of a SWOT analysis. (What I’m about to share is probably common knowledge to others, but this librarian was impressed!!) Once you’ve identified your SWOTs, you simply cross-pollinate them and see what happens. Use your strengths to leverage the identified opportunities and overcome weaknesses. Minimise threats by bolstering your strengths. This can be done with anything, from programs to operations to service design. To share the example from today’s workshop, let’s consider RhymeTime.
Strengths
Brings people to the library
Highlights the skills and expertise of library staff
Weaknesses
Time-intensive to deliver
Can be too popular
Opportunities
Easily transferrable to outreach
Partnership opportunities exist with other early years service providers
Threats
Pandemics — library closure prevents program from happening
Funding cuts
By pairing some of those up, we invite ideation and begin to form the basis of a strategy:
- By shifting popular RhymeTimes to a larger outreach venue, we can accommodate more families, and improve relations with a partner organisation by bringing an audience to them (or collaborating on a joint program),
- By leveraging partnerships with other service providers, we can, on occasion, invite guest presenters to deliver Rhymetime and reduce staff time/cover short-term absences.
PESTLE
The PESTLE tool is one I’m quite familiar with, but I was reminded today of the need to regularly reflect on and reassess the external influences affecting the library industry. When considering the ‘P’ in PESTLE (political factors), it’s crucial to examine issues at global, national, state, and local levels to fully understand any risks/potential impact they might have. What may seem like an issue elsewhere in the world can quickly become an issue here too, e.g. book bans.
(Michael) Porter’s 5 Forces
This tool is probably the most ‘businessy’ of the business tools covered today, and to be honest I could feel some discomfort in the room when words like CUSTOMER, RIVALS, and BARGAINING POWER were used. This is important because it speaks to the maturity level of library leaders and their willingness(reluctance?) to rethink our approach to strategy development and managing our services like businesses.
Leveraging the bargaining power of suppliers and our customers, and keeping an eye on rivals, is a surprisingly large part of my job. Just last week I was consulting on a marketing campaign, giving feedback that the headlines read like an Audible advert, and I knew that because I’d been studying the language of their advertising closely. Amazon are our rivals — the only difference is in our missions (one of us exists to make money). So when someone at today’s workshop remarked “where are all the ads for libraries?” it reminded me of how little we do to leverage the collective bargaining power we have as an industry (because we are both rivals AND allies to each other) and of how little business acumen we appear to have. If we’re to get out of this crisis (and be ready for the next one) we need to adopt more business tools and a more business-like mindset to how we’re managing our services. Otherwise, we’ll end up as redundant as Jeeves.
*(total sidenote, but I think now would be the perfect time for AskJeeves to make a comeback. As a 10-year-old I thought I could ask questions of that butler and that he’d parse my request and bring back an answer. He was about 25 years too early for that kind of thing, but surely the nostalgia factor would see him rival the likes of chatGPT, Alexa, Siri, etc today?)
Understandably, some folk reading this will have some reservations about borrowing/embracing business tools. I maintain that it’s important to keep the mission and purpose of libraries at the heart of strategic planning, to ensure nobody gets inspired to start LibraryCrypto or start selling premium memberships for exclusive services (oh, wait…).
Lastly, I was so happy to learn that Kyleigh has a book in development, and I will be updating this post with information about where/how to buy it once released.
