3 Reviewing your performance and that of your library

As you have looked at so far in this session, evidence gathering is invaluable to instil confidence in the findings of your reports. This is especially true when it comes to your annual report and reviews of your performance. Having data and information to show as evidence for your areas of success and those which need improvement, ensures that you and your line manager can reflect on the previous year and, moving forward, shape your aims and objectives in accordance with the school’s policies. When considering your future goals, you should ensure that they are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic and Time-Related. Each goal must, therefore, be well defined and unambiguous (specific), have an indicator against which success can be judged (measurable), specify who will be responsible for achieving it (assignable), be achievable (realistic), and have a deadline or timescale (time-related).

When it comes to your annual report, an ability to demonstrate engagement with evidence gathering can support your claims and requests, equipping you with facts necessary to safeguard yourself against any possible criticism. Likewise, being able to substantiate your achievements will strengthen your position, demonstrate a level of strategic management and professionalism, and help both you and your line manager in your annual appraisal. These are just some of the ways you can use evidence gathering to review your performance and that of your library.

Now watch Video 3 in which Sarah discusses the value of evidence in your annual report in more detail. After you have done this, think about how you’ve used evidence in the past when reviewing your library’s performance.

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Transcript: Video 3

SARAH:

We know that we do a really good job as a librarian, but it's difficult to get others to understand what we do, particularly when some of the parts of our job are invisible. And we make the job look easy, we make it look smooth because we have these underpinning routines. And the difficulty is that when everything looks really smooth, we open ourselves to the possibility that people give us more work to do because they think that perhaps we're not doing enough, so we need to be careful about this.

One of the ways in which we can demonstrate what we do is to produce an annual report and it can summarise how we've met the objectives for the year or any new initiatives that we've had or perhaps data for the new targets that we've been asked to achieve and we can give these to our senior leaders and our governors in writing.

Now, there's a few things that are important. One is to make sure that we only give them the kind of information that's going to be relevant to them. So that idea of tying it into the school mission statement and aims is really important. And the other thing is giving it to them in advance so that they can actually read it through. So that when you come to the discussion about it, it can be informed and you can say what your aims and objectives are for the following year and talk to them about this.

Sometimes if we make good report data, we can use it as a claim for some extra funding for the library. Or perhaps if we're under pressure, we might be asking for more staff. All of this is important to show how what we do impacts on the achievement of the school goals, and this can underpin the whole value of the library and it shows our management skills. If we can demonstrate our management skills, maybe we'll get a pay rise or perhaps, we'll be given some extra responsibility in an area that we would like.

So the data that we produce has to be for impact and it has to be relevant to the stakeholders. And we have to show the stakeholders why we might have included it in the report.

As librarians, we all like a story. So bear this in mind, when you're writing your report, is it readable? Is it something that the stakeholders are going to get something of value out of?

End transcript: Video 3

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