Universal Topics
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Nathan A. Delmar and Theresa K. Tarves
When considering what will guide a law library’s mission, goals, values, and everyday operations, no two things are more important than policy development and strategic planning. Both exercises provide a framework for law librarians to work within to ensure the success of its services within its organization and for its patrons.
While not often recognized as one of the most gratifying aspects of librarianship, policy development can be one of the most impactful exercises in the profession. Properly-executed, well-considered policy serves to guide everything related to library development and usage while mitigating areas of confusion and conflict for all stakeholders in a library. Strategic planning helps law librarians and other law library employees to understand the law library’s mission within its organization, how to provide value-added services that meet patron expectations and gives law librarians goals to work towards to ensure the law library’s success.
- Stated policy mitigates confusion among law library stakeholders and guides librarians in various situations.
- Librarians can develop good policies by leveraging existing policies at other libraries.
- A policy has the most impact when the right people have ready access to the needed policies.
- Plans should be based on key stakeholders, end goals, and budget considerations.
When wholly considered, policy development and strategic planning involve the entire library and its patronage, creating an inclusive effort and investment to make the law library the most it can be.
Policy Development How Policy Helps
Law library policies act as the instruction manuals to how a law library functions. Policy is collected information on how the library will act in various situations. Those situations can be varied to the point where policy can be collected and written for nearly any library-based context. In situations both routine and abnormal, the predictability gained from policy is a strength that can be relied on by the library’s staff and its patrons.
One of the first things that should come to mind in creating effective policy is thinking about what impact a policy document can have. It’s natural to question how impactful a written policy can be to solve problems that libraries face. Policy benefits a library by allowing librarians to focus on their individual roles and mitigating potential issues. Both benefits allow librarians to focus on more significant issues and projects rather than the minutia that often distracts from the work that directly impacts a library’s patrons.
Policy in Terms of Issue Mitigation
In its most useful sense, well-executed policy helps prevent issues that would cost a library anything from time, effort, money, or the goodwill of its patrons. But how does it perform this role, and what practical situations can a policy benefit its institution in preventing conflict and problems?
First, policy performs these r