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Sunday, January 06, 2008

Reorganize!

I realized that for these 3 years since becoming the library director, I was caught in the daily operational too much, so that most of the library matters got me involved to manage or decide. For the first year, it was necessary due to the transition, but it went on to the next years up till now.
For example, administration stuff are routines but since we used part-timer to handle those, she had limited responsibilities and decision making. Moreover, I had no chance to upgrade or empower them more because their part time position.
Daily policy such as paying the late check-in books penalty becomes my responsibility too whereas the circulation supervisor is enough to deal with it. I am tired, not because it is too much, but because I could not go further for the next progress in the library. While the province govt is leading the online catalog integration and other national group is preparing a digital library network, I got trapped in daily activities in the library.
So, a new resolution is needed for this new year. We need to reorganize our human resources, responsibilities and roles!!

The reorganizing here is distributing the operational decision making to the staff according to their position and having them collaborate in any situation which needs more than a person to decide based on library's basic rules and policies.
Achieving this stage, each staff is required to write down their standard operational procedures of their tasks. By having all SOP, they are going to share their skill and knowledge in order to equip other staff in making decisions.
We are aware that communication and report procedure are very important. Immediate report or flash news from new situation or ideas are worth to share. Therefore we are going to implement a groupware application called e-groupware to communicate ideas and information to each other every single day. Everyone is obligated to access to this application and has the same right to share ideas, report and information.

However, this application is not to replace meetings. Meetings are important for evaluating, planning and fellowship. The information shared through the e-groupware will prepare each to every discussion point in the meeting.

Having this plan, I, as the Library Director, will have more time and concentration to focus on where this library will go, and what is new in the library world that we can apply in the library. Moving toward is a must do. Therefore this changing cannot wait to show!

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