The 10-Minute Library Advocate #7: Define A Long-Term Goal for your Library

Define a Long-Term Goal for Your Library

If you want to move forwards, you first need to know where forwards is.

In order to ensure that the time and effort that you put into advocacy for your library is well used, it’s important to have an idea of your long-term goal.

It should provide a guide to your work, and help you think about whether what you are doing is succeeding or not. It can be an excuse to stop doing things when they are not contributing to your goal.

So for our seventh 10-Minute Library Advocate exercise, think of a long-term goal for your advocacy work for your library.

Your choice will of course depend on your context. Given that you’re focusing in this exercise on your own library, it may be about changing regulations that decide what you can or can’t do, about financing, or even about building support for your services within your community.

It should be ambitious (you want to improve on the current situation), but also realistic (you don’t want failure to be inevitable). If it helps, you can use the SMART framework.

Crucially, it should be something you can easily remember and refer to in your work!

Good luck!

See the introduction and previous posts in our 10-Minute Library Advocate series and join the discussion in social media using the #EveryLibrarianAnAdvocate hashtag!