On becoming essential: An agenda for quality in twenty-first century public libraries.

ABSTRACT

Changes in the social and economic fabric of American life have prompted public libraries to develop services and programs that are more in tune with the needs of individuals and communities. These efforts have uniformly focused on improving quality, although quality is of necessity a moving target. Among the strategies that public libraries have employed to improve their quality and both meet and anticipate new markets are defining the organization's core values and mission, capitalizing on new user-friendly information technologies, defining the library as a visitor destination, and bringing a customer locus to staff training and development. The importance of partnerships with a wide variety of entities is discussed along with the need to ensure the security of library users as well as their right to privacy. The author also emphasizes the need for more effective public relations and marketing strategies and the importance of listening to the customer as keys to building an organization characterized by exemplary quality.

Taking Aim on Quality

Quality and Change

In public libraries, "quality" means little unless defined within the context of change. The chorus of an old song begins, "Love and marriage, love and marriage. They go together like a horse and carriage." The lyric represents the tightly-linked character of change and quality.

American public libraries are awash in change. The tide includes the globalization of information; a rapid succession of innovations in computing and networking; heightened competition for public funding; population changes, including aging of the citizenry, variations in family composition, and shifts in ethnic and racial composition; and increasing alternatives to public library services, including new methods of electronic retailing (Holt, 1992, pp. 10-12).

As the waves of change ebb and flow, quality is redefined again and again - by constituents, as they shift their demands for services and materials; by staff, through their willingness to lead and follow within an always-changing organization; and by boards and administrators, who must obtain the necessary funds and set policies to maintain optimum institutional health. Within this context, public library quality is a moving target.

Quality and Completeness

American quality movements tend to be faddish. They fade in and out of style almost as fast as the best-selling business-book authors who espouse them (Byrne, 1995). TQM (Total Quality Management) is one example. 1994 brought publication of the library field's first TQM book; it also was the year in which a team of management experts published Why TQM Fails and What to Do About It (Brown et al., 1994). And, even as former Special Library Association president Guy St. Clair (in press) published a volume advocating TQM in libraries, Ronen and Pass (1994) revealed that TQM has failed half the time in the industrial workplace for which it was invented, and Sherer (1994) wrote that most of the 4,500 hospitals which had invested heavily in TQM had seen no financial benefits from it. Business Week, meanwhile, reported that "spirituality" was the hot new workplace quality tool replacing TQM and other older management methodologies (Galen & West, 1995, pp. 82, 84-85).

Neither TQM nor any other quality methodology offers a quick fix for public library dysfunctions. Making an organization work better involves rebuilding its culture - and that requires a comprehensive effort.

Most quality movements fail, writes Crosby (1992), because they are narrow in their focus. Completeness of effort throughout the entire organization is the best strategy to achieve quality:

Completeness .... is not something that pours itself on command - it has to be dragged out of the bottle. Once it is ... available, it adds flavor and consistency to everything it touches, and its container is never empty. The purpose of Completeness is to avoid problems and guarantee success. There are three principles of completeness:

1. Cause employees to be successful. 2. Cause suppliers to be successful. 3. Cause customers to be successful. (Crosby, 1992, p. 19)

Crosby then defines success:

Let us consider what success means in an organization, whether it be profit or nonprofit oriented. We must think of this success in terms of achieving agreed upon objectives, all of which are measurable. Objectives such as steady growth, ... low employment turnover, a high level of employee voluntary participation, education programs that fit everyone's needs, a management succession plan that works, continuous new product and service development, active support from suppliers, community admiration, and happy and prosperous shareholders [for libraries, community constituents and other stakeholders]. (pp. 17-18)

To follow Crosby's admonition, public libraries will need to make a complete quality effort. To paraphrase Battle and Nayak (1994), all government agencies, including public libraries, should become exemplary rather than ordinary in every possible way.

The enduring public library quality strategy involves the hard work of effective managers who seek, on a continuous basis, to raise every aspect of operations to an exemplary level. The public library quality effort will never be finished.

Becoming Essential: Changing to meet and

Anticipate Markets

The Customer Service Revolution

A customer service revolution has swept across America. Albrecht (1988), Davidow and Uttal (1989), and Peppers and Rogers (1994) are typical chroniclers of the revolution. Individuals of all ages and from all walks of life expect to receive first-class customized service whether buying things or services. When those expectations are not met, customers do not return.

Public libraries are one of the government agencies feeling the pressure for customized service. The introduction of TQM and other quality improvement methodologies is almost always centered on improving service to library customers (Hensler, 1994). The public libraries of Baltimore County, Denver, and Queens all have won widespread professional praise for their customer-is-boss service philosophies.

Becoming Essential

Like so much else in public libraries, however, customer service needs to be handled within the context of revolutionary times. The information age is reshaping work and family life. Like the mercantile and industrial revolutions before it, the information revolution does not lift all boats equally. For many families, the information age has become the age of uncertainty.

This uncertainty is characterized by middle-class layoffs that reduce some families from apparent security to poverty. Such families increasingly build their financial futures on the paychecks of two partners. That translates into more women working, including 60 percent of all mothers with children under six working outside the home.

These job and sex-role changes force public libraries to rethink collections and services. St. Louis Public Library (SLPL), for example, has seen adult fiction circulation drop from over 66 percent of all adult book circulation in 1988 to about 55 percent in 1994. According to one St. Louis librarian, St. Louisans increasingly read for survival, not for fun.

This trend, to use the public library for survival, is reflected in national survey data. D'Elia and Rodger (1994, pp. 23-28) report that, among a thousand persons surveyed, the traditional function of "popular materials library" has slipped to the bottom of a list of ten public library roles from which participants selected.

The roles that citizens most want the public library to play are those of formal education support center, independent learning center, preschoolers' door to learning, community information center, business and personal reference library, and public work place. All these roles were selected ahead of the role of popular materials library, some by huge margins. In St. Louis and throughout the nation, a voting and survey-taking citizenry pushes public libraries to play essential roles in their lives. And, if the library will play essential roles, the public will ante up.

When St. Louis Public Library promised to expand essential materials collections, increase essential services to adults and children, and make library services more convenient to use, voters in two different elections within six years increased the library's annual operating income by a total of 162 percent.

The willingness to pay libraries to do essential work is not merely a St. Louis phenomenon. D'Elia and Rodger (1994) report that, if public libraries performed essential roles desired by the public, survey respondents thought that public libraries ought to be receiving $34 per capita. That is twice the current national average of per capita support. A quality effort in library customer services needs to ensure that the services are wanted and needed. Even the best customer services are hollow if they do not meet essential community needs.

Anticipating New Markets

A more difficult task than meeting the essential needs of current constituents is anticipating demand for new services. Futurist literature and market forecasts often provide data which can help public libraries predict such changes. One example comes from Link Resources, a New York City market-research firm. The company forecasts "that nearly 60 million Americans will be working at home by 1998, up from 37 million in 1994." And growing home-business numbers highlight an even larger growth in small businesses. Link Resources says that businesses with ten or fewer employees will grow 10 percent between 1992 and the end of 1995, to reach 7 million firms in the latter year (Seymour, 1995, p. 102).

Expanding numbers of home offices and increased numbers of small businesses offer growth markets for the information services of a quality-oriented activist public library. Market data on home computers and software ownership suggest another growing market for public libraries. In 1994, 7 million personal computers were sold for home use, 60 percent to homes with children. Perhaps as many as 42 percent of households with children own computers. The current estimate is that 15 million homes have both computers and children, a number expected to escalate to 23 million by 1996.

Many home computers are purchased with CD-ROM drives. The CD-ROM computer home buyer is typically a double-income family with children. That product is used 40 percent of the time to play adult or child CD-ROM products. Households with children under seventeen spent about $1.8 billion in software in 1994 (Hochman, 1994, pC6 (D), pD6 (L); Triplett, 1994, pp. 1, 7; Flynn, 1994, p. C1). In comparison with the latter figure, the total 1992 operating budget for all public libraries amounted to just under $5 billion.

Online and printed materials on computers; computing and software; classes for parents so they can keep up with children's computing; providing reviews of popular children's software - these and dozens of other computer-related services can be developed as significant venues for public libraries.

Along with adjusting to shifts in current markets, Bower and Christenson (1995) suggest that innovative organizations need to help invent new markets. In an electronic age, that means working with still unproven "disruptive technologies." For public libraries, this idea translates into research and development projects using information technology not currently in the mainstream. One example of such projects involves experiments with optical and digital scanning to develop local information products. Another is working with geographical information systems.

In the latter category, SLPL has mounted 1990 census-tract data in a computerized geographic information system. This product found a ready constituency of social service organizations and business developers. "Disruptive technology" products can create the basis for essential relationships with new constituents.

Growing services which constituencies want - and anticipating new customer needs - are important determinants of essentiality for twenty-first century public libraries.

Where to Begin

In starting a comprehensive quality effort in a mid-1990s public library, some operational areas seem especially important. These are: (1) defining core values and an essential mission; (2) understanding and balancing information technology; (3) applying technology to improve library work; (4) the design of new user-friendly electronic environments; (5) the design of library visitor destinations; (6) training staff for shifting work roles; (7) greater attention to funding; (8) participation in partnerships; (9) new sophistication in the protection of library-service users; and (10) a new professionalism in communicating with users and nonusers alike. If a public library can achieve an exemplary level of performance in these critical areas, it will be well on its way to achieving a comprehensive approach to quality as that term is defined by those on whom the organization counts for support.

Most of the remainder of this article is a discussion of the ten quality-centered tasks which currently seem most critical to the success of every American public library.

Defining Core Values and an Essential Mission

Planning and role-setting processes are well-defined processes for American public libraries. In attempting to make public libraries essential, however, two tools for articulating institutional direction-statements of core values and institutional mission statements-deserve more attention than they have received.

Guiding Tenets

Core values are the essential beliefs around which organizations develop their operations. "Core values don't change," one former CEO notes, although practices do (Collins & Porras, 1994, p. 48). According to Collins and Porras, long-term business success always starts with core values which are held and practiced almost religiously by employees throughout an organization. Here are the core ideologies from three long-lasting, highly successful United States corporations (pp. 69-70), which, like public libraries, are focused on serving people:

Marriott

Friendly service and excellent value (customers are guests); "make people away from home feel that they're among friends and really wanted." People are number 1 - treat them well, expect a lot, and the rest will follow.

* Hard work, yet keep it fun. * Continual self-improvement. * Overcoming adversity to build character.

Nordstrom

* Service to the customer above all else. * Hard work and productivity. * Continuous improvement, never being satisfied. * Excellence in reputation, being part of something special.

Wal-Mart

"We exist to provide value to our customers" - to make their lives better via lower prices and greater selection; all else is secondary.

* Swim upstream, buck conventional wisdom. * Be in partnership with employees. * Work with passion, commitment, and enthusiasm. * Run lean. * Pursue ever-higher goals.

Public libraries wanting external models for the development of an institutional culture of quality should look to private-sector companies, which, like their own organizations, have been "built to last." Like these companies, public libraries would do well to begin their push for quality by defining their core values.

The following is a core values statement for Des Moines Public Library (Des Moines Public Library, 1994):

We are a community resource center and our information is essential to the progress, happiness, and full potential of all people. We believe our services should be available free and free of charge to all citizens. Libraries are an essential public service and it is the responsibility of government to adequately fund them. We are committed to nurturing children to become lifelong learners. We exist for our customers. We will be proactive in connecting our customers with universal information. We will provide and preserve diverse information in a variety of formats. Professional librarians are essential for quality library service. Our staff should be trained, motivated, well compensated, and open to change.

Obviously, other persons would articulate different core-value lists for their public libraries. No matter. The point is that statements of core values have an important place in the life of public libraries which seek to be and/or to remain quality centered institutions for centuries to come.

Activist Mission Statements

Private-sector businesses and public-service institutions endure because they know their core values and pursue them relentlessly. They succeed as well because they articulate and carry through on missions appropriate to the environmental realities in which they operate.

Nolan (1989, p. 32) provides criteria for library mission statements. St. Louis Public Library's mission statement meets Nolan's criteria (St. Louis Public Library, 1994): "The St Louis Public Library will provide learning resources and information services that support and improve individual, family and community life." The tone is activist; the job role is clear: Not only support but responsibility for individual and community improvement is the accepted mission. The activist character of this second mission statement is explicated in nine accompanying goals, all of which lend themselves to definable objectives and quantitative assessment.

To support this mission, the library will organize and prudently manage its resources to:

1. Ensure the library's resources are available to all. 2. Promote use of the library. 3. Assist children and adults with life-long learning. 4. Promote literacy for all ages. 5. Assist individuals in finding jobs and educational opportunities. 6. Assist business with their development and growth. 7. Provide current information. 8. Provide recreational reading resources, media materials, and programs. 9. Promote public use of modern information technology. (St. Louis Public Library, 1994)

A more visionary mission statement comes from Des Moines: "To enrich the lives of people by providing the information and resources for learning and pleasure, and to empower our citizens with knowledge, thereby strengthening the foundation of democracy" (Des Moines Public Library, 1994).

Public libraries historically have proclaimed themselves as support institutions that provide materials to individuals for their recreational, family, and job needs. An institution can support, however, without much community involvement.

All public libraries need to ask whether their missions meet community needs and constituency expectation. More public libraries need to articulate activist missions to tell their constituents that they are essential, not peripheral, community institutions.

The first quality building task for public libraries is to state the core values that energize the institution and form the basis of the institution's existence. The second task is for the public library to articulate an activist community mission. The third task, of course, is to follow through on an activist mission. Albrecht (1995) says that an organization that is following through with a clear vision and definite mission is like "the northbound train" heading rapidly to its known destination. No matter what, such trains always reach their destinations.

Any effort to innovate a quality movement in America's public libraries requires institutions to ensure that their core values are religiously preached and practiced by all staff and to make certain that their missions are essential - not peripheral - to their communities.

Understanding and Using the Technology Tool

Person-to-person Technology and New Markets

Just as the automobile created the privitized journey-to-work for everyday commuters (Holt, 1972), person-to-person networked computing is creating a growing privatized information-and-entertainment market. The automobile destroyed the streetcar as an intermediary transportation vehicle. Computerized networks also threaten market intermediaries-the movie theater, the video-rental store, the bookstore, the branch bank, and even the scholarly academic journal ("Academia Goes Online," 1995, p. 28).

The challenge to intermediary public libraries is explicit. "Infotainment" corporations want public library users to replace walking or driving to a nearby library branch for inexpensive at-home and in-office access to information and entertainment (pp. 17-18). Sirbu is typical of these electronic marketers. "We want to be able to sell a page for a dime," he noted recently, "so that it costs as little to get it off the Net as it does to walk to the library and make a copy of a journal" (in Wildstrom, 1995a, p. 21).

Technological Balance

To become, and to remain, essential to their constituents, public libraries need to adapt the new person-to-person information technology. In the words of Negroponte (1995): "The information superhighway is more than a short cut to the Library of Congress. It is creating a totally, new global social fabric" (pp. 181-83). Public libraries need to help weave that fabric.

At the same time, library boards and administrators need to heed cautioning admonitions from Stoll (1995), Brook and Boal (1995), and Sullivan-Trainor (1995). Technology, these writings warn, is a tool, not a panacea for whatever ails a bloated government agency, a person's rotten life, or a public library's inability to put one customer-service foot in front of the other.

Adding computer stations to a library with a badly organized reference unit will not much improve customer service. Adding a fancy OPAC search engine will not add much value to the customer experience if material cataloging, abstracting, and indexing have been neglected for a hundred years. And giving universal access to the Internet only adds to a stack of other financial and technological problems unless bargain-hunting e-mail users are taught to understand that "free public library" services have a price in widely shared tax payments.

For public libraries, technology is a tool, not a panacea. Investments in technology will not win and hold public library users without blending the new tools into a high-quality customer service program. In the end, a quality movement is always about balance. In no area is that more true than in public library technology investments.

Information Technology and the Workplace

Networked computing is transforming the public library work environment. First, to speed the process and reduce costs, public libraries are using networked computing for acquisitions management (Saunders, 1995, pp. 41-49). Most libraries soon will select, order, receive, catalog, process, obtain billing, and pay for materials with a single integrated computer network (Holt, 1994a, p. 24).

Second, networked computing enhances resource sharing. Various models exist. The Online Computer Library Center model allows easy interlibrary loans. The Virginia's Commonwealth Virtual Library stresses cooperative collection development (Hurt, 1995). And, a national bibliographic model exists in the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries. Increasingly public librarians will exercise the option of owning and borrowing, of managing access and assets (Higgenbotham & Bowdoin, 1993).

Third, technology tools provide librarians with enhanced power to act as authors or compilers. Already fully developed functions in the CARL and VTLS automation systems, authoring and compilation modules are increasingly available on other systems as well. Such modules make it easy for staff to create bibliographies, finding aids, abstracts, and indexes in anticipation of constituent demands. SLPL's genealogical indexing project and its St. Louis artists index, both in askSam databases, are examples of such staff-developed electronic products.

Fourth, in addition to giving librarians additional power to anticipate customers, e-mail may help overcome the interminable meetings which seem to be an indigenous public library tradition. E-mail networks provide the opportunity to inform instantly any staff member who is in the e-mail network to leave and to receive exact messages out of real-time sequence (Negroponte, 1995, pp. 167-68). Meanwhile, commercial software vendors like IBM-Lotus, Microsoft, and Nouvel-Word Perfect have added software allowing multiple authors to work on one document even though they are located at different sites.

Fifth, computerized networks are revolutionizing reference. A knowledgeable searcher located in a small neighborhood or rural library is no longer bound by the books on the shelf Moreover, the growing World Wide Web network of home pages translates into thousands of free sources of information both more comprehensive and more up to date than published sources. There is still much "picking through web clutter," but the richness is increasing (Wildstrom, 1995b).

A true quality movement in the public library looks everywhere for ways to make staff more effective in their work with both internal and external customers. Application of networked computing tools can bring profound quality improvements in those customer relationships.

User-Friendly Electronic Environments

Many public libraries are using computers, networks, and software combinations to create electronic environments which shift their positions in the region's information and entertainment markets. In establishing such environments, they build on a library tradition of end-user advocacy (Holt, 1993a, p. 45). Some examples follow.

First, many public libraries are involved in the development of civic networks or community information systems. States like Maryland, Maine, West Virginia, and Ohio have created statewide dial-in information systems (Smith, 1994, pp. 37-40), while cities as variant as Cleveland, Ohio; Springfield, Missouri; and Edinburgh, Scotland provide dial-in computerized databases and services. Some of these freenets provide free or cheap access to the Internet and the World Wide Web along with supporting area bulletin boards (Waldack, 1995).

One of the newest civic networks is in Eugene, Oregon, which features performing arts center schedules and building permit applications along with library services and access to the Internet. Those without home or office computers can use the Internet Public Access Center at the library (Eugene, OR, City of, 1995). In most public libraries that have them, dial-in services constitute the organization's fastest growing new business.

Second, to enrich these civic networks, public libraries have become information providers. The public libraries of Cleveland, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh, for example, are mounting extensive pictorial collections. St. Louis Public eventually will mount the 1990 St. Louis census in a GIS format; St. Louis genealogy and local-history indexes; and various government documents - ordinances, reports, draft laws, and application forms - as well as more specialized collections.

Most larger public libraries soon will have "home pages" on the World Wide Web. The key to necessary local support, however, will be found in how well the public agencies electronically provide the unique materials needed to carry on the essentials of family and business life. Such electronic publications not only will help lifelong learners but also area economic development as well.

Third, public library staff can save time for their constituents by organizing the mass of electronic information available on local, national, and international servers. This process can begin with libraries "evaluating sites and providing annotations for ... users so they understand what they are choosing to view" (Hawthorne, 1995). Further, library staff can develop electronic guides to help searchers through the metadata and megafiles with which they must deal online (Holt, 1994a, p. 25). In the process, constituents will begin to see the library as the public equivalent of a private-sector "information clearinghouse" and the librarian as a personalized "information agent" (Snider & Ziporyn, 1992, esp. Pt. 111).

Fourth, networked computing provides the opportunity to provide new and traditional users with customized services. Public libraries have reams of user data, far more than most retail stores. The quality task is to find responsible means to link this information to acquisitions and collections for the benefit of users. The customizing possibilities are endless: book ordering by users that helps guide acquisitions; automatic searching for new information in electronic databases and sending it to constituents who have identified particular needs; and sending personalized e-mail messages about library programs to customers who are likely to be interested. These are examples of true customized services.

Martin (1993, pp. 42-44) suggests the myriad roles that librarians can play in creating electronic environments. These are to:

* Select and deliver information that users need at the point and moment of need. * Create and maintain systems that provide accurate and reliable information. * Promote the design of information systems that require little or no learning time for effective use. * Correctly analyze users' questions and provide them with the information they need. * Initiate contact with potential information seekers to ensure a widespread understanding of professional services available to them, including assistance for those who do not wish to use the library independently. * Further the development of the virtual library, a concept of information housed electronically and deliverable without regard for its location or to time.

Constituents will not see public libraries as essential quality-oriented institutions unless they develop electronic environments that meet specific information needs in a timely and convenient way.

Library Visitor Destinations

Defining Destination Experiences

Libraries can learn a lot from Mickey Mouse. In a Disney facility, the company manages every aspect of the visitor experience. Signs, routing of pathways, visual destination points, ride placement, and landscaping all push visitors in particular directions. Places where lines gather adjoin small shops and food stands. Exits from major attractions empty into activity pavilions designed to slow visitors before they move to the next major attraction (Duke University, 1995). Shopping malls also manage visitor experiences. Whether it is the massive Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, or the elegant Rodeo,) Drive in Beverly Hills, California, shopping center designers arrange visitor sights, sounds, and even smells to encourage longer stays, relationship shopping, and recreational use and higher spending.

Museums have learned from Disney and shopping malls. Through the years, museum researchers have built a body of studies on why visitors motivated to visit particular destinations and how they act once they are there.

Hood describes six criteria by which individuals judge leisure activities (cited in Falk & Dierking, 1992):

1. being with people, or social interaction;

2. doing something worthwhile;

3. feeling comfortable and at ease in one's surroundings;

4. having a challenge of new experiences;

5. having an opportunity to learn; and

6. participating actively. (pp. 16-17)

The Library as a Destination Experience

Building on theme park, shopping center, and museum-visitor literature, public libraries need to design destination experiences. That is, along with molding new information environments, public libraries need to design some library facilities as magnets that attract people for the sheer fun of being there.

Within Hood's criteria, some public libraries already function as destination experiences, places so distinctive that they attract persons from throughout a region, a state, or nation. The research facility of the New York Public Library is a true destination experience, attracting researchers by the power of its collections. It also attracts tourists who simply want to see the 42nd Street facility as a "sight."

Without such distinctive collections, other public libraries still have created powerful venues that attract visitors out of proportion to the actual size of the facility. The Columbus, Ohio, main library has a youth discovery room and an electronic-media marketplace of such richness that they have become regional magnets for suburbanites who make special family trips to central Columbus just to go to the library.

In Las Vegas and in metropolitan Toronto, planners have used joint tenancy - with theaters and city agencies - to create library-and-public-service magnets that attract and hold users. These joint tenancy facilities, of course, replicate a piece of library history, a time when a library might be housed in the same "city building" as the community auditorium, local government offices, and the locale's only swimming pool. Such facilities help customers make good use of their time while promoting library use and a sense of the fit of the library into the essential life of the community.

St. Louis Public Library's attempt to develop distinctive visitor experiences is taking it in two different directions. One effort involves Central Library, which will come to feature an electronic product and computer software and database shopping place combined with a computer based family literacy center (Holt, 1994b). As this installation is being planned, a youth-focused branch designed to attract school groups, daycare centers, and families is being installed in the system's oldest Carnegie branch (McGuire, 1995). It will feature twenty computers with appropriate youth-oriented software and 50 percent of all its materials will be dedicated to serving children and young adults.

Both of these facilities will rely on shopping center and museum visitor models to help define the public library as a visitor destination for family education and recreation. Both installations will provide experiences that are substantially different from those of a science museum, an amusement park, or a video arcade. The theme of each experience will be low-pressure individual and small-group learning (Holt & Holt, 1995).

The 1995 AIA-ALA building awards demonstrate the current spirit of innovation in both renovations and new buildings (Weigand, 1995, pp. 298-306). This spirit of innovation provides a good basis from which public libraries can start creating distinctive destinations that offer family or age-group-specific experiences that attract and delight with such power that constituents come to see them as leisure time family-oriented destinations. Attracting visitors and introducing them to library services will become a major quality activity for many public libraries as they approach the twenty-first century.

Training Staff for the Future

Self-actualization and Quality

In 1981, pollster Daniel Yankelovich described the "tectonic plate shifts" in American values through the previous half century (Yankelovich, 1981, pp. xi-xii). One such shift was that Americans increasingly had come to expect the opportunity to "self-actualize" on the job (pp. 53-59). That is, workers had come to expect, in addition to a paycheck, a sense of accomplishment and value from their work. Even in 1980, Yankelovich found that workers felt more accomplishment on the job when they worked in teams with clear missions, control over the work process, and a sense that management valued their effort.

Quality movements almost always have self-actualization built into them. Basic TQM ideas for libraries - "managing by fact," "eliminating rework," "respecting people and ideas," and "empowering people" (Riggs, 1994, pp. 6-7)-are basic to self-actualization on the job. An all-controlling micro-management never has worked very well in public libraries any more than it has in private business; distributive management works better (Sitkin et al., 1994).

The key to a self-actualizing work force, like the key to distributed management, is training. It will take a trained staff to help public libraries create the essential services and products which will win and hold the support of library constituents.

Quality Goals for Staff Training

Like definitions of quality, concerns about staff training change with the environment. Framed by the intriguing discussions in Harris and Hannah (1993), ten staff training issues seem particularly pertinent just now.

First, staff - especially professional staff - need to be trained to recognize that their employment opportunities will endure only so long as their skills are up to date. Public librarians need two sets of information skills: those for handling and managing information and those that will help their organizations create essential knowledge for their constituents (Nonaka & Hirotaka, 1995). Cataloging may give way to abstracting; reference may give way to answering e-mail queries; public service may be redefined as tiered services for different market niches. All these changes will require extensive retraining.

Second, public librarians need to be trained in the skills of organizational effectiveness, including job empowerment. That means the ability to communicate well up, down, and laterally within the organization. That means managers who know how to lead and play essential roles in work teams, those who know how to deal with change resisters, and those who can handle disciplinary actions when someone proves incapable of fitting into a teamwork setting. Self-actualizing workplaces are built on disciplined communication and outstanding team leadership. Neither comes without workforce training.

Third, training must make clear the real purpose of instituting a quality movement in a public library. Too often management quality initiatives are no more than exercises on the way to planned downsizing. Heckscher (1995) has shown how corporate downsizing has broken worker loyalties to employers. Some local government employees, including public library staff, because of periodic recisions, down-sizings, and layoffs, are experiencing the same "white-collar blues" about which Heckscher writes. If a public library is instituting training for a true quality movement, then the organization needs to train staff in exemplary performance, performance measurement, and performance evaluation.

Fourth, public library training needs to be built on correct assumptions about adult education. In adult education, it is recognized that adults more frequently "lock out" education than accept it. To get past the "lock out," staff need to see payoffs because of the training. For some, that will mean the ability to do the job better; for others, it may be increased pay; for many, it will be the hope to gain tools to shape up their colleagues - because trainees almost invariably see their workmates as the ones who need to change (Graham, 1982, pp. 195-96). There is much that library trainers can learn from adult education professionals.

Fifth, public librarians need to be trained to work increasingly with nonlibrarians. Specialists in computing, networked communications, literacy, education, training, facilities maintenance, finance, fund raising, marketing, and public relations are among those making their way on to public library staff lists. Moreover, librarians will have to manage more paraprofessionals as library work reorganization patterns follow those already carved out in banking and health care. just as in those professions, computer networks will remove some skill needs from particular jobs. One part of this training will be for those who manage outsourced work, which already has become significant in technical service fields. As library dependence on networked computing increases, shifting job roles and changing work will make regular retraining a survival imperative for all public librarians.

Sixth, in-house and contract training will focus on making most librarians more specialized rather than more generalized in their education. True collegiality comes from mutually respected knowledge, as the staff Internet navigator helps the business reference specialist, the youth-software selection specialist assists the picture-books selection specialist, and the online indexer and abstractor for a particular subject joins the book cataloger in delineating new access points to knowledge. In other words, public libraries will have to train librarians in specializations which most graduate schools of library education are unable to provide both because of lack of subject breadth in small faculties and lack of time in master's degree certification.

Seventh, public librarians will have to train each other and the paraprofessionals who work with them. There is an insufficiency in library training by library schools, and outreach education and distance education still are primarily concerned with new certifications rather than retraining those in service. With so many educational needs and such insufficiency in supply, larger public libraries can be expected to build more extensive educational programs than they have at any time since the 1930s (Holt, 1993a).

Eighth, public libraries will have to provide advanced and ongoing training in new technology. University library training shows that even long-term older paraprofessional staff can become proficient and feel empowered with computers if given appropriate training and exercise time to learn routines (Palmini, 1994, pp. 119-27). Moreover, public library technology training will become more technology based. Already universities are using computer-based training modules on various library functions, including periodical access, resource sharing, reference, acquisition, and cataloging. Such training helps morale and keeps staff knowledgeable and informed (Bayne et al., 1994. pp. 78-81).

Ninth, increasingly public libraries will train their constituents in the use of information technology. In communities with poorer populations especially, the public library is likely to face strong community pressure to empower residents so they can compete in the modern electronic world. The public libraries of Queens and Cleveland already have responded to this challenge. Many other public libraries will become major trainers of their citizens as well.

Tenth, as part of work empowerment, public librarians have to be trained to accept accountability. All modern quality movements involve the devolution of institutional authority to small-sized work teams (Boyett & Conn, 1991, pp. 234-65). With team empowerment comes increased accountability for all team members. Accountability training means making the library system work. Accountability tasks are as pedestrian as they are important: solid job descriptions, appropriate intervention to make the team function at a high level, formal performance appraisals, operation of a solid recognition and reward system, and knowledge of how to use disciplinary action when those in the work team do not accept the responsibilities given them.

In carrying out this and other training regimens, a good set of general guidelines was provided in 1984 by Ketchum (cited in Boyett & Conn, 1991, pp. 234-35). Workers, according to Ketchum, have the following needs:

1. To join with others in a common task;

2. To have the latitude to make decisions about how work was performed;

3. To receive recognition for his or her contributions to work performance from his or her peers, supervisors, and support personnel;

4. To learn and to continue to learn;

5. To make reasonable use of his or her intellect;

6. To receive information about how he or she is doing and what was going on in and beyond the immediate work area; and

7. To feel that his or her contribution was important and part of the logical whole. (Cited in Boyett & Conn, 1991, pp. 234-35)

If public libraries are going to thrive, if they are going to become essential quality institutions, they cannot be "psychological slums," to use Ketchum's phrase. Tabscott and Caston (1993) conclude that the technology centered organization needs team structures that reengineer work. Boyett and Conn (1991, pp. 234-327) state that the new information organization will put the employees in charge. And Weingand (1994, pp. 72-97) says that the public library will become nothing less than a classroom for those who work there. At the heart of all these workplace expectations is extensive and continuing training.

Quality and Consistency

Work reorganization, supervision, and training all need to be used together to make certain that the entire public library staff values consistency. The bane of service organizations is inconsistency, and public libraries are too often inconsistent. For every outstanding librarian there is a pointing librarian, a librarian who refuses to acknowledge a user while doing "professional reading" and a talking-on-the-phone reference librarian. And, for every example of great library service there is a no-staff-in-the-children's - area library and a library building with filthy restrooms, dirty floors, and ragged books in the "current" section. Inconsistency is the bane of quality libraries.

Consistency is hard work. Consistency is most often found in institutions where management makes high standards a fetish; leaders specify institutional and individual performance expectations; staff receive training and retraining; supervision actually works; the reward structure with salary as only one element) is in place; and where everyone is caught up in making the institution more essential than it was yesterday. Consistency is usually associated with a formal methodology using techniques like quality teams, benchmarking, and other in-vogue or traditional methodologies for achieving consistent performance. Consistency is the rock on which all public library futures can be built. Without consistency, the public will not come to see a library as essential. Without consistency, quality is ephemeral.

Obtaining Funds

Public library quality is directly related to institutional financial support, and that support is undergoing significant change. In spite of dramatic rhetoric in favor of networked connectivity and a national information-kiosk system (Newcombe, 1995a, pp. 16-17, 48), federal funding for public libraries continues to decline (FCC fails..., 1995, p. 5; Verity, 1995, pp. 90-91). One possibility is that federal funding will devolve into a series of competitions for small "demonstration grants." Even the most optimistic scenario does not provide sufficient federal funding to construct public library on-ramps to the information highway (Senate Version..., 1995, p. 1).

With already minimal federal funding in decline, the massive differences in state funding become more apparent. At the upper end of the spectrum are states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, which have devised funding mechanisms that recognize the significance of public libraries beyond the limits of local property tax districts. At the lower end are states like Missouri, Mississippi, and Louisiana, where state aid is so parsimonious that only a few rural libraries depend on it for any significant part of their annual operation.

In a few states without strong state aid programs for public libraries, the latter institutions have been helped financially by innovative information-technology programs originating with state government. In Maryland, Iowa, Maine, and West Virginia, to name only a few of the best-known examples, public libraries are being brought into computing networks on statewide systems organized by state universities, departments of state government, and state libraries.

Even in those few states which provide significant support for public libraries, however, many still have to rely on their own initiative to secure the funding they need to mount the vast new technology initiatives their constituents expect. In response, many libraries are developing specific strategies to carve out future sources of revenue. Adjusted for many local factors, these strategies vary greatly.

Queens Public and San Francisco Public are preparing to export public library services internationally - the former east, the latter west - across two vast oceans. Cleveland Public and Pittsburgh Public reach out with powerful regional electronic models.

Heading into tightened times, Baltimore County intends to compete as an Internet vendor with the private sector, with a plan to charge multiple fees to win a significant part of future funding (Rodger, 1994). The library systems of Little Rock and St. Louis, both with the capability to appeal directly to their voter-users, campaign and win major tax increases in low-service, low-tax effort states.

Rural and small-town public libraries show the greatest funding variation. Some live hand to mouth, surviving almost entirely through the work of a few friends who raise funds or dig into their own pockets to keep their libraries open. Others, blessed with prosperous local districts and/or benefiting from relatively generous state equalization formulas, have solid budgets that support solid collections and extensive outreach (Holt, 1995d).

Many systems have resorted to traditional fund-raising models used by other cultural, educational, and philanthropic organizations for a hundred or more years. Hundreds of public libraries both big and small now have philanthropic foundations. And traditional earned income opportunities seem to be growing as well, as public libraries open library shops, restaurants, and coffee bars, and as friends groups operate successful book sales in places as different as Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Houston (Holt & Schlafly, in press; Woodrum, 1993).

In an age in which already small federal government is shrinking and state support varies greatly, public libraries have become both more political and more entrepreneurial in their efforts to increase revenues and cultivate private sector support (Robbins & Zweizig, 1993, passim; Verity, 1995, pp. 90-91; Holt, 1993c, 1995a, 1995b).

In sum, many public libraries are building fund-raising cultures. This process involves a series of steps: conducting an institutional plan, preparing a financial needs statement, finding out the community's fund-raising style, identification and cultivation of donors, selection of campaign leadership, training of campaign spokespersons, creating a context through an institutional marketing program, and putting together a donor recognition plan. After that preparation, prospects brighten for raising funds from private sector donors (Holt & Schlafly, In press).

Finance is important in relation to quality because, in the public sector, quality costs money. Unless a library is running in a grossly inefficient way, a better-quality library service - whether more trained reference staff, a broader range of printed materials, or the latest in compact disks and videos-is going to cost more than shoddy service, old books and videos, and compact disks purchased out of the trunk of somebody's car. Adequate funding is imperative if public libraries are going to become and/or be maintained as quality institutions in the twenty-first century.

Partnerships

Public libraries attempting to raise their quality frequently recognize that they need more resources than they can muster through one organization, and they turn increasingly to partnerships to move the institution forward. These partnerships are of four types.

First, there are partnerships for production. In these, public libraries join private-sector information vendors as electronic knowledge creators (Arnold, 1993). A soon to be published Gale quick reference volume is one such partnership. To create a trivia reference volume for public libraries, Gale and the reference departments of several public libraries are deciding the entries to be included, with each library reference staff providing quality control.

Second, there are partnerships to secure and share audiences. In today's fast-moving world, public libraries need to take audiences where they can find them. St. Louis Public has found eager audiences for library materials and programs in hundreds of daycare and senior centers, boys' and girls' clubs, and school classrooms. It is often cheaper to export materials, programs, and electronic services to these audience locations rather than to open one lightly used branch after the other.

Third, there are partnerships with service providers to organize programs. St. Louis Public currently is working with a theater production company and a health care service provider to import specialized services into branch library settings. The St. Louis system already has provider partnerships with the St. Louis College of Health Careers, Grace Hill Settlement, and the Parents as Teachers Program of the St. Louis Public Schools.

Fourth, libraries need to form partnerships with donors. Through cultivation and demonstration of success, St. Louis Public has built long-term relationships with corporations like Commerce Bank, the St. Louis Cardinals Baseball Club, and several media outlets among others. In donor partnerships, the private-sector agency receives high payback through association with the public library, which they see as a quality service provider and a high visibility, broadly based community agency.

With resources always less than are necessary to provide essential services, public libraries will turn to partnerships to make effective use of resources, build quality programs, and grow financial support.

Protect Individuals and Access

Constituent concern has brought security center stage as a public library quality issue (Holt, 1995c). The concerns are two-fold: the security of persons during library visits and the security of access to electronic and paper materials.

Because public libraries deal with such a wide range of individuals, both kinds of security require policy balance. In each case, the need is to protect the vulnerable from the criminal. The rights of the individual in library facilities usually can be protected by a problem patron policy, which defines inappropriate behavior under state and federal law; training of all staff in security procedures; systemwide use of security professionals; and suitable electronic surveillance equipment.

Children present a special security problem. Parental desire for libraries to serve in loco parent is puts a strain on relations with constituents. Advances in networked computing complicate the issue; any library attempt to protect children in the electronic environment may imply the assumption of custodial responsibility (Holt & Holt, 1995).

A recent New York case highlights the issue. Prodigy has marketed its network as family oriented, including a conscious decision to remove obscene messages from its e-mail and advertising bulletin boards. Because of this policy, the New York Supreme Court recently ruled that a person subjected to nasty remarks may sue Prodigy for libel. Prodigy's defense was that it serves more as a bookstore rather than as a book publisher. In response to the decision, a Harvard Law professor critical of the decision commented: "You're dealing with the law of cyberspace - it doesn't exist. We're fumbling here" (Court Opens..., 1995, p. 12A). As they establish policies respecting their networked computers, public libraries have to deal with this legal morass.

Another security issue involves patron databases. Most libraries protect their patron databases under state law. As networked computing in government has grown, however, so have problems of networked security. SLPL computer systems already have registered invasion attempts, although no one has gotten close to the patron database. Other public libraries face similar problems.

Appropriate system planning to eliminate "holes," segregation of public and administrative networks, programming security "firewalls," and assignment of one-time passwords all help in networked computing security. In the final analysis, however, library security comes down to management, commitment, and money. "Senior management must be willing to commit funds and manpower to ensure security doesn't fall behind the exploding use of computers in government," Newcombe (1995b) noted recently (pp. 23-25). The same thing can be said of personal security for library visitors and staff.

In 1990s America, security is a quality issue. How public libraries work through the maze of legal issues around protecting constituents, especially in the electronic environment, often turn into make-or-break events in constituency perception of public library quality (Gordon & McKenzie, 1994).

Listening and Communicating

Tools for listening

To build solid relationships with constituents, public libraries need to utilize constituency listening skills. Traditionally libraries have listened informally-by participation in community organizations, attendance at community meetings, and talking with patrons. Swiftly changing markets make it necessary to use more formal techniques for taking the community pulse.

Well-tested techniques include in-house and telephone surveys and focus groups. For example, a new branch focus group told St. Louis Public's interviewer that they wanted "a room full of computers" since no neighborhood families could afford them. A youth focus group objected to always being served by adults. In the mall stores where they shopped, they encountered high school and college students with whom they could communicate. Another youth group wondered why the library's popular music collection was always out of date. An operational follow-up showed that the music fashions changed so fast that by the time many CDs and tapes were cataloged, youth constituents regarded them as "old."

Libraries need to use formal listening techniques to help overcome what psychologist Gilovich (1991) calls "cognitive errors" that form the basis for bad policies. Overcoming such deficiencies helps service organizations remain essential to their constituents' wants and needs.

Communicating

In spite of SLPL's best marketing and publicity efforts, focus groups and surveys always seem to show that constituents feel they are not sufficiently informed about library services. In the din of commercials on radio and television and in magazines and newspapers, it is no wonder that the message of one public library frequently gets lost. However, such constituent criticisms should inspire any public library to seek different means of telling its citizenry about its essential services.

The main problem with public library communications is that they tend to be too print oriented and too focused on those who already use library services. Like other libraries, SLPL reaches these user-constituents through traditional communication mechanisms, including bookmarks, calendars, flyers, brochures, and a monthly newsletter, but all public libraries need to break out of this print marketing prison.

SLPL's communication tactics provide illustrations. The library buys mailing lists of other "cultural" institutions for likely users and friends' members who are solicited through mail and telephone; creates marketing partnerships with high visibility organizations like the St. Louis Cardinals and their media affiliates to obtain public service announcements promoting youth reading on television and radio; directs messages specifically at African-American audiences through The St. Louis American, a heavily circulated weekly; buys advertising on half-a-dozen radio stations, each oriented to a different demographic market; and purchases space on billboards in neighborhoods with an active street life.

Public libraries that hope to build an essential quality based relationship with their constituency must learn to communicate with people where they are, not where the library is. Listening and communicating are basic quality activities of public libraries. If a library does not know what its public wants, or if a library does not actively inform its constituency about available services, a community will have little sense that the library is a quality organization.

LEARNING TO REMAIN ESSENTIAL

This article has been a discussion of how public libraries can take aim on quality. Caught up in a seatide of change, public libraries can become quality institutions, but the change will take more than tossing an intermittent TQM effort at the organization.

Real quality efforts are comprehensive and long term. In the case of public libraries, they involve doing everything possible to make the organization essential in the lives of communities. That includes making sure that the library message of essentiality has been communicated to the staff and constituents on whom the organization depends.

A recent editorial on government reform concludes ("Deinventing Government," 1995):

[In the private sector] good management .... look[s] for the company's core strengths, and pares away other parts.... Companies adapt because markets tear away the inessential. Governments ossify because they cling to every mission forever. Until that changes, management reforms are little better than pallatives.

A library quality movement is far more complex than involving staff in decision making and smiling at customers. To be successful, it has to focus on defining, funding, organizing, and marketing essential products and services. Said in another way, that means quality will involve a complete effort by the organization to make the library essential. With such an effort, public libraries guarantee a bright future for their organizations and a better future for their community constituents.

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