Agenda - 05-14-2013 - 1 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Orange County Public Library Strategic Plan 2013 -2016 Staff Input The Orange County staff are proud of their work, believe they are effectively meeting the needs of the community, but also believe there is room for improvement. The priorities for provision of library and information services are well aligned with the community's. Staff feel that the strengths of the library are the commitment and work of the staff, especially in regards to customer service and children's services in particular, and are also very proud of their main library facility and the high level of support and resources provided by the county and community. Their primary opportunities for improvement and, what they believe should be the library's top priorities, are the need to increase marketing, outreach and advocacy, address and increase staff morale, continue to improve programming, services and resources, and continue to embrace new technologies and digital services and the requisite trainings that need to go with them. Based on the results of this study, the following six priority areas were recommended for consideration as strategic goals and objectives for the Orange County Library system: 1) Develop a countywide seamless library services integration plan. 2) Identify list of prioritized and aligned library and information services by library demographic profile. 3) Develop a technology integration plan. 4) Develop a comprehensive marketing and outreach plan emphasizing partnerships and community collaboration. 5) Prioritize funding to strengthen its core suite of services. 6) Prioritize high quality organizational communication, training, and culture. The full needs analysis report submitted to OCPL and the State Library can be found as Appendix A. A complete list of the community needs analysis interviews, focus groups and forums is in Appendix C. Strategic Planning The strategic planning process began in January 2013 and involved convening an Internal Departmental Work Group comprised of both external and internal members of the library (See Appendix B.) This committee was charged with taking the results of the needs analysis and developing OCPL's 2013 -2016 Strategic Plan. This plan includes a vision and mission statement, organizational values and core competencies, and high priority goals and objectives to be accomplished over the next three years. The Internal Departmental Work Group met four times from January through April 2013, including two four - hour work meetings, which led to the creation of a draft strategic plan. The Library staff also met in parallel to this process in two half -day sessions to ensure that all OCPL staff had input. The resulting draft strategic plan, which combined input from both the work group and staff, was then released to the public, which involve nine community focus groups, a hard copy mail survey to 1,000 randomly selected Orange County residents, and a public online survey. 51 Page ORANGE -ZOU NfTY 32