Public Library Service in Horowhenua : now and in 2030

I have a small task to do .. nothing too challenging for a wet Thursday... I need to prepare 'something' to communicate to Council Officers what the library service delivered by Horowhenua Library Trust in 2030 might look like. Yes - I can hear you laughing - and now that I have stopped weeping, I am actually starting to feel excited by this.

The Background.
Very briefly: we have a new library building planned for Levin, we have been messed around for about 5 years, change of staff at Council, new chap thinks we have no vision, no plan, no idea what we want to achieve (obviously case studies, building briefs etc etc have been "lost" in the bowels of Council) . Moving along ...

The Good News
And this really is good news:

• Council are not disputing that we need a new building - they just want to know what we want to 'put' in it,
• Fundraising is going splendidly well - we have almost $2m already.

Refresh our Vision
We now have this golden opportunity:

• take back control of the project and drive it ourselves,
• think about changing societal trends in general and Levin in particular in 2030,
• refresh and define the role of HLT library service in the community both now and in 2030,
• consult with our community about what they want,
• recommunicate our vision.

I put out a wee cry for help on Twitter yesterday and the lovely Brenda Chawner and Alison Wallbutton sent me through some really useful links that I am including here for future reference.

Current Library Thinking

• Public Libraries of NZ : Strategic Framework (NZ, 2006).
• The Unison Report : taking stock of public libraries (UK, 2008)
• The Darien Summit : The Future of Libraries (2008) and The Darien Statements.
• The Future of Public Libraries.

The last link above is a visioning project currently being undertaken in Australia. While the report isn't out yet, but due any day, what I have found on the net so far is quite inspiring. The exercise is based around a scenario matrix, from which 4 possible scenarios are derived.



The good folk doing the work have shared their slides as well (I love librarians:)

Scenarios To Strategy

View more presentations from PublicLibraryServices.

Societal Trends

• 2009+ 10 trends,
• The Futurist

Local Context

• Horowhenua Development Plan: Executive summary and Levin
• Statistics NZ : Levin

What next
So the plan from here is to read through the future trends stuff about society in general, take a look at the Statistics NZ stuff for Levin demographics, then the Horowhenua Development Plan to see how Council see our local community developing over the next 20 years. We need then to think about that all in relation to the Future of Libraries scenarios, and from there come up with a vision of the role of the public library in Levin,now and moving forward, and the services we will be offering and the functions we will fulfil.

Easy!