The use of public library roles for effectiveness evaluation

LISR 16, 41-58 (1994)

The Use of Public Library Roles for Effectiveness Evaluation Nancy A. Van House School of Library and ~nfo~ation Studies snivels of ~a~~orni~ Berkeley

Thomas A. Childers Drerel University Philadelphia, Pennsybnia This article examines the roles from the Public Library Association pla.uning and measurement tools for their usefulness in evaluating public library effectiveness. It addresses four questions: What roles are chosen most often?, Can we distinguish among libraries based on their role choices?, Do libraries with different role choices perform differently?, and, Can performance differences form an empirical basis for role definitions? Data for this study came from the Public Library Effectiveness Study (PLEX), a survey of 2,418 stakeholders in 84 public libraries nationwide. Respondents from the sampled libraries evidenced both uniformity and diversity in their choice of roles; the favorite roles were those historically associated with public libraries. The libraries could be divided into one group serving smaller populations and focusing on the more popular roles and another serving larger ~pulatio~ and aspiring to f&ii a greater variety of roles. The cluster with a greater variety of roles also performed better than did the other group on more than half of the effectiveness indicators tested. This study has implications for future revisions in standardized role statements and for future research finking performance to organizational goals.

Planning and evaluation have been major concerns for public libraries since at least the l%Os,when the Public Library Association (PLA) began sponsoring the development of what has become a set of tools to help public libraries (McClure, Owen, Zweizig, Lynch, & Van House, 1987, Pahnour, Bellassai, & DeWath, 1980; Van House, Lynch, McClure, Zweizig, & Rodger, 19I3’J$Walter, 1992). In the current economic climate, with many libraries making substantial service reductions to accommodate budget cuts, libraries must look more carefully than ever at their priorities and performance.

Direct cxxrespondance to: Nancy A. Van House, School of Library and Information Studies, University of California, Berkeley, California 94?20 < [email protected] 5.

41

42

Van House

81 Childers

Planning and evaluation address both internal and external needs (Childers & Van House, 1993). Internally, they help library management to set priorities, design programs and services, and allocate resources. Externally, the public library has to explain its mission continually and demonstrate its value to the community to justify its tax support. Public sector organizations have a particularly complex relationship with their environments because, unliie private enterprise, their services are only indirectly tied to revenues. The public decision makers who have to be convinced of its value are generally not the consumers of the library’s services. PLA has been engaged in a long-term, systematic effort to develop tools to assist public libraries in planning and evaluation. These tools (McClure et al., 1987; Public Library Association, annual; Van House et al., 1987;Walter, lW, Zweizig & Rodger, 1982) have been used extensively, but they have not been systematically evaluated. Their widespread adoption suggests that many library managers have found them useful. However, recently the principal author of the planning manual and co-author of the measurement manual, McClure, suggested that the time has come for the planning manual to be reevaluated. One of the areas that he noted as being in need of investigation and revision was the service roles (McClure, 1993). PLA is currently considering revising these tools. UNIQUENESS, SIMILARITY, AND EVALUATION Public libraries are both unique from and similar to one another. The tension between uniqueness and similarity is critical to understanding planning and evaluation in public libraries and the uses of the PLA tools. Forces for Uniqueness

among Public Libraries

The PLA planning manual (McClure et al., 1987), the measurement manual (Van House et al., 1987), and the children’s services measurement manual (Walter, 1992) take a goal-based approach to planning and organizational effectiveness that stresses the uniqueness of each library and the need to respond to local conditions. These publications encourage each library to develop a mission, goals, and objectives suited to its community; to design appropriate operations and services; and to assess its progress toward its objectives, all in the context of its unique conditions. Four major forces tend to cause uniqueness across public libraries. The combined result of these forces is centripetak public libraries will tend to differ from one another as the result of a cumulation of local needs and decisions. The first force is the needs of the community as diagnosed by the library staff and local political decision makers. No two communities are exactly alike, so neither will be their information and library needs. The second is the library’s resources, culture, and history. Organizations, especially in the public sector, change incrementally. Each develops a culture and market position that tend to be stable. In public sector organizations, services attract client groups that resist changes that threaten their favorite services. The lack of a market test-services do not generate revenues to support themselves-makes it relatively easy to add services but difficult to discontinue them. The result is a tendency toward organizational accretion: the addition of new services but not the elimination of old ones.

The Use of Public Library Roles

43

The third factor is politics: what the local community wants and will pay for and its assessment of the return on its public investment as expressed through the political process. The final force is professional culture: the independent judgment of the staff concerning community needs and appropriate services and operations. Professionals expect to exercise a large degree of autonomy in decision making and in the service function. The power of the individual service provider to define organizational actions and services is a major distinguishing feature of service organizations (Hansenfeld, 1983). Forces for Similarity Although the PLA approach stresses the uniqueness of each public library, the unstated assumption is that this uniqueness exists within a larger domain within which public libraries are similar to one another-hence their abiity to use common planning methods, role statements, and measures of output. Of course, these organizations share at least some family resemblances that enable peopel to label them as “public libraries.” Organizations in the same business will have commonalities in their missions, services, and approaches. Countering the forces for uniqueness are a number of forces for similarity. Among organizations staffed by professionals, a major source of similarity is the staff members’ identification with their profession; this association tends to unify their definitions of the organization’s mission, services, and operations and of their own roles and tasks. In libraries, this unity comes from a common educational background and from socialization to the norms and values of the profession. Shared goals are based on agreement about what needs to be done. Such agreements are socially constructed and are based on shared vision and values (Wilson, 1989) or mental models (Senge, 1990). A major part of professional education is designed to instill these visions, values, and models. A second source of similarity is the uncertainty of organizational action. Managers hypothesize, in effect, about causality when designing operations and services: they choose actions that they conjecture will meet their goals. Library managers must identify unstated (and often unrealized) needs, invent useful services, predict demand, and design effective services. The primary source of information about all these is the library’s past experience and that of others. Organizations tend to copy and adapt one another’s successes. A third source of similarity for public sector organizations may be the evaluation process itself. Evaluation is based on expectations and information. An evaluation judgment consists of comparing perceived organizational performance with expected performance. Evaluation requires a referent, a basis for deciding what is good (Cameron & Whetten, 1983). The community holds some general expectations of public sector organizations, such as efficiency, equity, and freedom from corruption. Beyond these general expectations, however, the public and local decision makers may be uncertain about what to expect from the public library. This is particularly true of services that are not highly salient to the public as a whole. Because more people care passionately about, say, schools than they do about public libraries, they have firmer and more informed opinions about how the schools should operate and what constitutes good education. In comparison, they often have limited and stereotypical ideas of appropriate public

44

Van House 81Childers

library functions. The result may be limited expectations of the library, relatively few and straightforward demands, and easy satisfaction. A major source of expectations about local government operations is similar jurisdictions. In determining whether the library is providing the right services, and enough of them, at a reasonable cost, local decision makers often look to similar jurisdictions. In addition, the availability of a service in one jurisdiction may create demand in another as members of the public learn of a potentially useful service and ask for it from their own library. In sum, the experiences of other libraries influence both the library staff and local decision makers in making decisions about their local library. The result is a tendency for libraries to converge on a similar set of choices about services and operations, especially the libraries in neighboring or “similar” jurisdictions. The result of these forces for both uniqueness and for similarity across public libraries is a tension that is evident in the PLA plamGng and evaluation tools. Libraries are encouraged to think of themselves as unique but to use a uniform set of roles and measures. They are encouraged to evaluate themselves on their own goals and objectives but to collect data on a standardized set of measures. They are told that cross-library comparisons, given diiering missions and objectives, may be invalid but are asked to provide data for a published summary report. Finally, library managers may argue for individual organizational differences, although they and their funders continually compare their libraries to those in similar communities. Evaluation and Comparison Library managers compare their libraries to those in similar jurisdictions both for their own decision making and for managing the expectations of their resource providers. Similarity may be defined on any of a number of characteristics. Most commonly, these include geographical proximity, population size, and demographic composition. The Public Library Data Service (PLDS) (Public Library Association, annual) collects data on library finances, resources, community size and demographics, use, output measures from Van House et al. (1987), and role choices from McClure et al. (1987). That the PLDS chooses to include these data implies that these are the dimensions that its designers believe likely to be relevant for similarity/uniqueness judgments and for which data are available. Demographics and resources are obvious bases for similarity. Output measures can be used in two ways: to identify similar libraries based on their performance or to compare the performance of libraries defined as similar based on other dimensions. Libraries that are similar on demographics and resources may, nevertheless, diier in their mission, goals, and objectives and would be expected to differ on their performance. The PLDS allows libraries to report their choices from among the service roles described by McClure et al. (1987) as a way of describing differences in libraries’ missions. These roles were devised by the manual’s authors and advisory committee based on their own experiences and concepts of the public library. These roles are used to help libraries (1) in planning, by suggesting possible roles for them to adopt or modify and (2) in evaluation, by facilitating comparisons with libraries with similar service domains. No effort was made to verify the roles empirically, but that they have been

The Use of Public Library Roles

45

used extensively and reported in the PLDS suggests that the profession has granted them face validity. An important question is how useful are the roles for defining similar libraries. The purpose of this article is to use data from the Public Library Effectiveness Study (PLES) to examine the PLDS roles and their usefulness in evaluating effectiveness. The purpose of this article is to examine the roles described in PIanning and RoleSetting for Public Libraries (McClure et al., 1987) and reported in the PLDS for their usefulness in evaluating effectiveness. The article addresses four questions: 0 Which roles are chosen the most often? 0 Can we distinguish among libraries based on their role choices? 0 Do libraries with different role choices perform differently? l Can performance differences form an empirical basis for role definitions? The study examined the roles chosen by the libraries in the sample, clustered libraries with similar role choices, and compared the performance of libraries in the different role clusters. The overarching question was whether libraries with different role profiles diier on their performance. The role statements may be useful for purposes other than evaluation. For example, libraries report that discussion about roles is useful to educate organizational members to their library’s mission. The question here is not whether the roles are of any use at all, but rather, how helpful are they for describing subsets of libraries for evaluation purposes? Related Research A considerable amount of research has addressed the definition of effectiveness and measured effectiveness in various organizations (Cameron & Whetten, 1983, Goodman & Pennings, 1981). Of particular interest for this study is the research devoted to organizational effectiveness in higher education (Cameron, 1978; 1986) and in public sector organizations (Jobson & S&neck, 1982; Quinn & Rohrbaugh, 1981). This research has, for the most part, been devoted to the definition of organizational effectiveness. The major conclusions from this research have been that organizational effectiveness is a multidimensional construct, that for public sector organizations constituent satisfaction is particularly salient, and that public sector organizations have multiple constituent groups, each of whom is likely to evaluate the same organization differently (Van House & Childers, 1993). Work addressing organizational effectiveness in libraries has been primarily concerned with reporting on measurement efforts and the development of measures and methods for a variety of organization functions and services. Baker & Lancaster (1991) summarizes some of these efforts. The closest research to that reported here is that of Cameron in higher education (Cameron, 1978; Cameron, 1981; Cameron & Tschirhart, 1992, Cameron & Whetten, 1981). Cameron identified several dimensions of university effectiveness and several major types of universities based on performance ratings by university administrators. He deduced a set of organizational missions from the universities’ performance profiles. He did not ask the universities to identify their own roles but rather inferred them from the universities’ performance.

46

Van House & Childers

Public libraries are unique in having a standardized set of role descriptions-the roles from the PLA planning manual-on which to typify themselves so that organizational missions can be systematically compared and related to performance. The question is: Is there a relationship between self-identified roles chosen from this standardized set and organizational performance? In particular, since public libraries have made extensive use of them, can these roles be used to distinguish subsets of libraries for the purpose of evaluation and cross-library comparisons? DATA The data for this analysis came from the PLES, a national survey of 84 public libraries. The full methodology and major findings are reported in Van House & Childers (1993). The data for the present study are from a survey of librarians in the sample libraries. In each library, four public service librarians and four managers, including the library director, were surveyed. In other parts of the study, other constituent groups were included, but only the librarian subjects participated in the part of the study described here. Roles Respondents were given a summary description of each role from McClure et al. (1987) and asked to rate the importance of each role in the library’s current program of services on a scale from 0 (least important) to 3 (most important). Some libraries may have used the process prescribed by McClure et al. (1987) to come to a formal decision about roles. Others may have followed a different process, using these role statements or inventing their own. Yet others may not have formally addressed role choices. Even where no formal role choices had been made, however, if the role statements are valid definitions of common public library missions, one would expect librarians to be able to choose those that most closely reflect their visions of their own organizations. An inspection of the survey responses showed considerable differences among librarians within libraries as to what they believed their library’s current roles to be. Therefore, in this study the director’s role ratings were assigned to each library on the premise that this person has the greatest authority and broadest perspective. The inconsistent responses may mean that the PLDS roles do not sufficiently reflect the organizational priorities, and in struggling to match their libraries to the predefmed roles librarians make different choices, i.e., a problem of inter-rater reliability, or that differences exist among librarians about their library’s priorities. The first explanation cannot be ruled out, but the latter is consistent with the authors’ experience working with libraries doing planning. Librarians often have sharply divergent ideas about their library’s priorities, especially in libraries that have never formally addressed the question of organizational mission. An important determinant of organizational performance, particularly in public sector service organizations, is shared vision and values (Wilson, 1989) or mental models (Senge, 1990). In public libraries, as noted above, the professionals exercise considerable autonomy in determining library operations. Many public libraries are geographically dispersed organizations-branch systemsso that branch staff activities are difficult to monitor and control. In service organizations, a major part of the

The Use of Public Library Roles

47

organization’s output consists of a direct, unobservable interaction between the individual staff member and the client, for example, reference service. Differences in role choices among the librarians within a library, if they exist, suggest inconsistencies in the staff’s definition of organizational mission and priorities that are a serious cause for concern, but such analyses are beyond the scope of this study. What is notable is that a lack of agreement on role priorities could (1) seriously interfere with the the library’s performance and (2) affect respondents’ evaluations of their library’s performance. The multiple constituencies’ approach to effectiveness posits that different constituent groups will have different expectations and, therefore, different evaluations of an organization’s performance (Tsui & Milkovich, 1987). The implication of this disagreement on role choices is that even among organizational members differing priorities will be reflected in evaluation judgments. Performance A list of 61 potential indicators of library effectiveness was derived from the literature, interviews, and survey pretests. (Van House & Childers (1993) discuss the method by which the list was developed.) Library performance was assessed by asking librarian respondents to rate their library’s performance on each indicator on a scale from 1 (low) to 5 (high). Th e result is a subjective assessment of library performance. Although objective measures of library performance are desirable, these were precluded by the lack of comparable data from a large number of libraries on a sufficient range of library performance measures. The use of subjective assessments by organizational participants is common in organizational effectiveness research: Cameron (1978,198l) and Jobson & S&neck (1982) relied on subjective assessments by organizational members for the same reasons. Factor analysis was used to collapse the list into 13 dimensions of public library performance, as described in Van House & Childers (1993) and reported in Table 1.

TABLE 1 Performance Dimensions Usage and Community Impact

Materials Staff Management Quality Expenditures Building In-library Services Community Fii Public Participation Building Access Larger Materials Issues User Reaction Peripheral Usage

48

Van House & Childers

Performance ratings are based on a combination of information and expectations: an observer judges how well an organization performs relative to his or her expectations based on whatever information she or he has about performance. Librarians with the same information for the same library but different role choices and different expectations are likely to evaluate its performance differently. Therefore the director’s performance ratings were used as the library’s ratings. FINDINGS Role Choices For the roles to be useful in differentiating among libraries, the libraries must differ sufficiently in their role choices. Table 2 shows considerable uniformity among the most highly rated roles: Reference Library and Popular Materials Library were given the highest importance ratings by over 90% of the library directors. Preschoolers’ Door to Learning was also highly rated. There is a gap before the next most popular role. (Respondents were allowed to write in additional role choices, which 69 of 585 librarian respondents did. The new roles, however, did not suggest any common roles that had been overlooked.)

TABLE 2 Role Choices, Directors

Role Reference Library Popular Materials Library Preschoolers’ Door to Learning Community Information Center Community Activities Center Independent Learners’ Center Formal Education Support Research Center

M

SD

2.92

.39 .35 52 .74 99 94 .a5

2.89

2.73 2.22 1.89 1.93 1.94 1.37

1.04

% of 3’s (most imoortant) 93.9

90.2 76.8 40.7 34.2 34.1 28.0 19.5

Scale from 0 (unimportant) to 3 (important)

The most popular roles are reassuringly predictable: providing reference service and popular materials are two of the public library’s traditional functions. Then, much less popular than these two but more popular than those that follow, comes Preschoolers’ Door to Learning. This is a less traditional public library function, but it seems to be growing in importance. However, many librarians told the authors that they have redefined this role as Children’s Door to Learning, which is one of the public library’s key enduring functions. If respondents made this same translation, then the

The Use of Public Library Roles

49

high ranking of this role is predictable. The next set of roles combines new, ~tra~tiou~ roles with some that are not particularly new but less common. These results from directors are consistent with, but a little different from, the rankings from all librarians (including directors) reported in Table 3. The biggest difference is Formal Education Support, which 77% of all librarians, but only 28% of the directors, gave a “3.” A likely explanation is the difference between consumption and control. Library management’s priorities for services may not reflect the uses actually made by the public. A frequent topic of debate in public libraries is the library’s role in formal education support as a homework center for children or in support of post scondary education. The library may not make formal educational support a priority for collection development, but students generally use the library for that purpose, nevertheless. Public services librarians may reflect in their answers the use that the public actually makes of the library, whereas directors may be reporting the library’s ~tention~ priorities.

TABLE 3 Role Choices. All Librarians (Directors Included) Role Reference Library Popular Materials Library Preschoolers’ Door to Learning Community Information Center Formal Education Support Community Activities Center Independent Learners’ Center Research Center

M

SD

2.80 2.77 2.73 2.73 2.03 1.97 1.86 1.45

.47 80 54 54 89 .93 1.oo 99

% of 3’s 86.4 80.2 80.2 77.0 35.7 34.9 33.6 17.2

N 583 585 583 585

580 581 581

Scale from 0 (unim~~ant) to 3 (impo~ant)

Given the nonempirical origins of the roles, one may question whether the role statements are independent of one another or whether there is redundancy among them. Factor analysis uses similarities in variable values to reduce a set of variables to a smaller number of more general, under&ing dimensions. The assumption of factor analysis is that if the value of variable A is always closely associated with that of variable B, then they may both represent the same underlying construct C. Although iu assigning roles to libraries the researchers only used the directors’ responses, this was not necessary in the factor analysis. For factor ana@sis, the researchers were interested not in which roles belong to each library but in which roles tend to hang together in the assessment of respondents. Because factor analysis is better with more cases rather than fewer, the responses of all librarians who had answered the role questions were used.

50

Van House & Childers

Table 4 reports the factor analysis results. The criterion used for determining the number of factors was the number of eigenvalues greater than 1.0. Factor loadings equal to or greater than .4 are usually considered significant.

TABLE 4 Role Factors Factors 1

2

h*

Community Activities Center Community Information Center Research Center Preschoolers’ Door to Learning

- 60 .74 .71 .41

-.Ol .13 .lO .41

.70 .56 Sl .34

Popular Materials Library Reference Library Formal Education Support Independent Learners’ Center

-.16 .ll .21 .39

.73 66 g .40

.56 .45 .29 .31

2.44 30.5

1.21 30.5

15.2

45.7

Role

Eigenvalue % of variance explained Cumulative % of variance explained

Two factors explained 46% of the observed variance in role ratings. The first factor can be characterized as the less common public library roles. Community Activity and Community Information Center are relatively new public library roles. Generally, only the strongest libraries aspire to be a Research Center. Preschoolers’ Door to Learning, as already noted, may be a more or a less traditional role depending on how closely the respondent stays to the definition given in the questionnaire ( McClure et al., 1987). The second factor is composed of more universal roles. Popular Materials and Reference Library were the two most commonly chosen roles, and Formal Education Support and Independent Learning Center both address the library’s long-standing educational role. What the factor analysis suggests is that for these 585 librarians two major dimensions of public library mission are tapped by the eight standardized role statements. These can be labelled traditional versus less traditional or common versus less common. With only two factors and with little variation among libraries in the traditional, common roles, the role statements are of limited usefulness for distinguishing libraries’ missions. Another way to address the question of how useful the role statements are in differentiating among libraries is to cluster the libraries based on their role choices and to look for differences across the clusters.

The Use of Public Library Roles

51

LIBRARIES WITH SIMILAR ROLE CHOICES

Cluster analysis is a statistical method that creates sets of subject&n this case, libraries--based on similarities in values on the variables of interest in this study, role ratings. The result is empirical groupings of libraries with similar role profiles. (Factor analysis of roles grouped the roles, and cluster analysis grouped the libraries based on similar role choices.) Several clustering methods exist, each of which generally gives somewhat different results. No universal criteria exist for the number of clusters to create or the clustering method to use. Rather, the clustering chosen is generally that which is most useful for the analysis (Hair, Anderson, & Tatham, 1992). The current analysis sought the clustering that best relates role choices to library performance. The directors’ role choices were used. Cluster analysis is very sensitive to outliers, so cases with very unusual patterns of variable values are usually dropped. In the present analysis, two libraries that were outliers in terms of role choices were dropped, as were libraries with incomplete role data, leaving 70 cases. Several clustering methods were tested. The one adopted used a complete linkage or furthest neighbor approach and resulted in two clusters of libraries, one consisting of 19 libraries and the other 51.

TABLE 5 Cluster Analvsis Results

Cluster 1

Cluster 2

@=19)

@=51)

X Rank Community Activities” Community Information Center” Formal Education Support” Independent Learners’ Center Popular Materials Library Preschoolers* Reference Library Research’

l

.79 1.70 1.47 2.11 2.74 2.42 2.89 .89

8 5 6 4 2 3 1 7

MannWhitney Factor X Rank U Probabilitv

2.24 2.39 2.06 1.98 2.92 2.83 2.94 1.59

5 4 6 7 2 3 1 8

.oo

.oo .Oi .71 .ll DO .13 .02

Statisticallysignificantlydifferent at p = .05

Table 5 compares the two clusters on their ratings of each of the eight roles. The results of a Mann-Whitney U test indicate that the two groups’ role ratings are statistically significantly different for five of the eight roles. The libraries in the first cluster rate all the roles consistently lower than do those in the second cluster, except for three roles on which they do not differ, all of which are roles that loaded onto Factor 2, the more traditional roles. The clusters differ, therefore, on the relative importance that they place on the less traditional roles. In sum, the first group of

52

Van House & Childers

libraries aspires to a more limited scope of activity than does the second. Both groups place an equally strong emphasis on traditional roles; the second group also places a strong emphasis on less traditional roles. To further typify the two clusters, Table 6 compares the libraries in the two rolebased clusters on several size variables using data from the American LibraryDirectory (annual). Cluster 2, the more ambitious group, also serves significantly larger populations. Expenditures per capita do not differ. The more ambitious libraries, therefore, are no wealthier, on average, but serve larger populations and place a higher priority on a greater variety of roles. This may well be an example of economies of scale: larger libraries do more.

TABLE 6 Size Variables, Role Clusters Mean 6landald Devkition~

Population

Annual Circulation

Book Volumes Held

Cluster 1 b7=19)

Cluster 2 b7=51)

r value

260,300 (279,203)

531,700 (774,400)

-2.16,

1,590,500 (1,989,930)

2,276,900 (3,049,700)

-1.10

1,010,263 (1,338,OOO)

-1.70

588,800

(1,010,300) 281,200 (556,000)

Expenditures (Materials 81Staff)

555,900 (916,200)

-1.27

-.Ol

Circulation per Capita (KY) Expenditures per Capita

10.70 (.67)

-50

lp<=.05 PERFORMANCE RATINGS The second research question was whether libraries with different role choices would be rated differently on the performance indicators. If the roles accurately describe differences in library priorities, one would expect libraries with different role choices to perform differently on the various indicators. A failure to fmd such differences could

The Use of Public Library Roles

53

mean that the role statements are insufficiently distinct or otherwise do not capture the differences between libraries, that the libraries surveyed have not linked their actions with their espoused roles, or that differences exist but have not been detected by the study’s methods and measures. Table 7 shows that the two groups of libraries clustered by role choices differ on 34 of the 61 performance indicators, more than would be expected by chance. The conclusion, therefore, is that the role-based clusters do differ in their performance as measured by directors’ assessments. When they do differ, Cluster 2, the more ambitious, has the higher performance ratings. Sixty-one indicators are too many to interpret easily. The purpose of the factor analysis on indicators was to reduce them to a more manageable number of underlying dimensions.

TABLE 7 Mean Library Performance Ratings by Role Clusters Directors’ Responses Mean Ratina Indicator Building Easy to Identify Energy Efficiency Circulation Board Activeness Convenience of Hours Total Expenditures Program Attendance Contribution to Community Well-being Range of Materials Reference Fill Rate Staff Continuing Education Voluntary Contributions Handicapped Access Amount of Planning and Evaluation Number of Visits Services Suited to Community Library Products Community Analysis Awareness of Services Inter-library Cooperation Convenience of Location Building Appeal Relations with Community Agencies Users’ Evaluation

Cluster 1 Cluster 2 3.32 2.68 2.89 2.39 3.05 2.37 2.42 2.89 3.21 3.16 2.79 2.53 3.21 2.63 3.16 2.84 2.37 2.63 2.42 3.21 3.47 3.21 2.74 2.89

3.46 2.69 3.36 2.96 3.37 2.98 2.94 3.48 3.44 3.42 2.86 2.72 3.26 3.18 3.42 3.42 2.53 2.82 2.88 3.66 3.52 3.41 3.33 3.35

t-value -40 -34

-2.45* -2.78= -1.53 -2.54. -2.42” -3.47. -1.14 -1.75 -.28 -.74 -.24 -2.46” -1.49 -3.17” -63 -.62 -2.78* -2.36* -.26 -1 .Ol -3.81* -2.43* (continued)

54

Van House & Childers TABLE 7 (Continued) Indicator

Staff Contact with Users Materials Availability Staff Suited to Community Newness of Materials Building Suitability Efficiency Pubiic Involvement in Library

In-library Use of Materials Variety of Users Staff Expenditures Equipment Usage Flexibility of Library Public Relations Free-ness of Services Staff Size Library Use Compared with Other Services/Events Written Policies, Etc. Public Opinion Interlibrary Loan Staff Helpfulness Range of Services Materials Expenditure Users Per Capita Info About Other Collections Speed of Service Managerial Competence Volume of Reference Questions Support of Intellectual Freedom Number of Materials Owned Staff Quality User Safety Goal Achievement Materials Turnover Parking Materials Quality Special Group Services Staff Morale

Significant at p c = .05 Scale from 1 (low) to 5 (high) l

Cluster 1 Cluster 2

f-value

3.16 2.53 3.16 2.84 2.68 2.72 2.37 2.89 3.05 2.37 3.05 2.89 2.58 3.42 2.16 2.95

3.59 2.98 3.53 3.24 3.12 3.31 2.33 3.24 3.35 2.84 3.29 3.40 2.88 3.73 2.86 3.12

-3.04. -2.21 -2.60” -1.91 -2.023.72* .16 -2.29-1.48 -1.75 -1.53 -2.72. -1.35 -2.15. -2.90” -84

3.16 2.95 2.95 3.26 3.00 2.37 2.68 2.68 2.95 3.11 2.63 3.53 2.58 3.00 3.11 2.74 2.89 2.63 2.84 2.53 2.79

3.31 3.65 2.92 3.57 3.43 2.86 3.22 3.06 3.22 3.49 3.43 3.69 3.20 3.51 3.47 3.27 3.14 2.62 3.43 3.18 3.16

-.74 -4.52. .13 -2.09. -2.32. -2.06-2.85” -1.84 -1.77 -2.49* -4.41* -1.17 -2.90” -3.28, -2.48* -3.91 -1.47 .04 -3.05* 3.23* -2.31

l

l

l

The Use of Public Library Roles

55

Comparing the two role-based clusters on the 33 performance factors from Table 1, one finds that they differ on only one of the 13 factors, Management Quality @ = .0.5). Several other clustering approaches and numbers of clusters were tried, with no more easily interpretable results in terms of performance factors. The conclusion is that the role-based library clusters do differ on their performance, and so the role choices do help to distinguish empirically among groups of libraries. The difficulty is in finding a way to interpret these differences meaningfully. The performance dimensions derived from the librarians’ responses do not map easily onto the differences across role-based clusters of libraries. DISCUSSION Public libraries evidence considerable uniformity in their choice of roles, with the roles that are ~sto~~y associated with public libraries emerging as favorites. These may be considered more prototypical public library roles, more central to the current concept of the public library. In the tension between uniqueness and similarity, public libraries tend to be similar in their emphasis on these roles and more unique in their emphasis on the others. Of course, the use of a standard set of role statements biases this analysis in the direction of similari@, a different approach, one that constrained the libraries’ choices less, would be needed to look more closely at issues of uniqueness across libraries. The findings are consistent with the factor analysis on role ratings, which identified two major dimensions of public library mission represented by the eight standard roles: traditional and less traditional, or common and less common. With only two factors and with little variation among libraries in the traditional, common roles, the role statements are of some but limited use in ~t~~~g libraries by their missions. A larger sample of libraries might have resulted in more role dimensions and more differentiation among them. Clustering the libraries by role choices, the libraries in this sample could be differentiated into one group serving smaller populations focusing on the more popular roles and another serving larger populations aspiriig to a greater variety of roles. Both clusters placed high emphasis on traditional roles. The conclusion from the role factor analysis and clustering is that public libraries are distinguished not by their relative emphasis on each role but by the extent to which they go beyond the traditional roles. The picture that emerges is of a set of organizations with a common core, the traditional roles, supplemented to varying degrees by other roles. The performance differences across the role clusters show that the more ambitious group tends to rate its performance higher on more than half the indicators tested. One possible explanation is response bias: some respondents may have tended to answer both role and performance questions using the higher end of the scale on each question. This explanation cannot be ruled out. However, that the more ambitious libraries (or res~ndents) also serve larger population suggests not response bias, which should be randomly distributed, but two distinct groups of libraries that differ on population sire, service aspirations, and accomplishments. One might reasonably expect a library serving a smaller population to be more modest in both its aspirations and accomplishments.

58

Van House & Chih-lers

Attempts to develop role definitions empirically from the performance data were of only limited success. Various approaches to developing performance profiles based on the performance ratings failed to yield interpretable results. Attempts to match clusters of libraries based on roles and performance, following Cameron (1981), failed. Cluster analysis offers no criteria for the number of clusters, and given the variety of clustering methods and the number of role and performance variables, no criteria could be developed to choose among the many possible analyses. What is needed is a theoretical basis to be tested rather than an empirical treasure hunt. The limited size of the sample-beginning with 585 librarians in 84 libraries, reduced to 70 libraries for which complete, usable data were available on all the variables used in these analyses-requires caution in the interpretation of these findings. A larger sample would likely have resulted in more, and more highly differentiated, clusters of libraries and possibly more role factors. This analysis was based on the public library roles previously defined by McClure et al. (1987). As time passes, the applicability of these roles to current public library contexts and services becomes more questionable. The concept of using role statements to compare libraries with similar missions, however, remains useful. The premise-that library missions should be taken into account in making cross-library evaluation comparisions-is sound. With the current emphasis on results-based management in the public sector (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992), public-sector organizations will face increasing demands to assess their performance and to make cross-jurisdictional comparisons on effectiveness and efficiency. What may be needed is a set of roles that better describe current reality, especially nontraditional library roles, and that better differentiate among libraries. The common core of library services described by the roles Reference Library and Popular Materials Library will probably remain. What’s needed is more information about how public libraries differ at the margins of the construct “public library.” It may be possible to describe empirically public library roles. An interesting although difficult approach would be to start with performance data, as did Cameron (1981), and develop roles from performance profdes. This would require substantial data -- objective and/or subjective--on organizational performance from a wide range of libraries. Another possible approach would be to partition the existing roles into smaller, more precise, more highly differentiated descriptions of library goals and then empirically combine them, using data on library behavior, into higher-level role concepts. Future studies may find it possible to use additional, objective performance data. This study used only subjective assessments of library performance because of the difficulty of obtaining comparable objective data describing a wide range of library activity for a large enough number of organizations. CONCLUSION

Public libraries engage in a common core of activities, with the differences among libraries appearing at the margin, in their decisions about the extent to which to supplement common roles with less traditional ones. Libraries serving larger populations complement the core roles with less traditional ones at no increase in per

The Use of Public Library Roles

57

capita funding they also generally perform better on most indicators. This suggests that larger libraries may be more effective. More finely serenity role descriptions would help to identify differences among libraries and the relationship between role choices and performance. Relating performance to role choice is complex but will be increasingly necessary with growing emphasis on performance and accountabiity in the public sector. For this, better descriptions of library roles or activities, more finely differentiated and more responsive to the rapid change facing all information organizations, and better data on library performance, will be needed. REFERENCES American library directory (unnua& New York: Bowker. Baker, Sharon L., & Lancaster, F. Wilfrid. (1991). The me~u~ment and #abuzz of library services (2nd ed.). Arlington, VA: Information Resources Press. Cameron, Rim S. (1978). M easuring organizational effectiveness in institutions of higher education. Administrative Science Quarterly, 23,604-629. Cameron, Kim S. (1981). Domains of organizational effectiveness in colleges and universities. Academy of Management Journal, 24,25-47. Cameron, Kim S. (1986). A study of org~tion~ effectiveness and its predictors. Management Science, 32,87-ll2. Cameron, Kim S., & Tschirhart, Mary. (1992). Postindustrial environments and organizational effectiveness in colleges and universities. Journal of Higher Education, 63,87-W. Cameron, Rim S., & Whetten, David A. (1981). Perceptions of organizational effectiveness over organizational life cycles. ~~~~~ve Science beg, 26, 525-544. Cameron, Rim S., & Whetten, David A. (1983). Some conclusions about organizational effectiveness. In K. S. Cameron & D. A. Whetten (Eds.), Organizational effectivness:A compariion of multiple models (pp. 261-275). New York: Academic Press. Childers, Thomas A., & Van House, Nancy A. (1993). What’s good? ~~~bing~r public library’s eflectivness. Chicago: American Library Association. Goodman, Paul S., & Pennings, Johannes M. (Eds.). (1981). New perspectives on organizational effectiveness. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Hair, Joseph F., Jr., Anderson, Ralph E., & Tatham, Ronald L. (1992). Multivariate data oasis (3rd ed,). New York: Macho. Hansenfeld, Yeheskel. (1983). Human service organizations. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. Jobson J.D., & S&neck, Rodney. (1982). Constituent views of organizational effectiveness: Evidence from police organizations. Academy of Management Joumat 25,25-46. McClure, Charles R., Gwen, Amy, Zweixig, Douglas L., Lynch, Mary Jo, & Van House, Nancy A. (1987). PZanning and role setting for public libraries. Chicago: American Library Association. McClure, Charles R. (1993). Updating Planning and role setting for public libraries: A manual of options and procedures, Public Libraries, 32, 198-99.

58

Van House & Childers

David, & Gaebler, Ted. (1992). Reinventing government: How the entrepreneurial spirit is transfomting the public sector from schoolhouse to statehouse, city hall to the Pentagon. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Pahnour, Vernon E., Bellassai, Marcia C., & DeWath, Nancy V. (1980). A phznning process for public libraries. Chicago: American Library Association. Public Library Association. Public library data service statistical report: Annual. Chicago: Osborne,

Public Library Association. Quinn, Robert E., & Rohrbaugh, John (1981). A competing values approach to organizational effectiveness. Public Productivity Review, 5, 122-140. Senge, Peter M. (1990). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. New York: Doubleday/Currency. Tsui, Arm S., & Milkovich George T. (1987). Personnel department activities: Constituency perspectives and preferences. Personnel PsychoZogv, 40, 519-537. Van House, Nancy A., & Childers, Thomas A. (1993). The public library effectiveness study. Chicago: American Library Association. Van House, Nancy A., Lynch, Mary Jo., McClure, Charles R., Zweizig, Douglas L., & Rodger, Eleanor J. (1987). Output measures for public libraaries. Chicago: American Library Association. Walter, Virginia A. (1992). Output measures for public library service to children: A manual of standardized procedures. Chicago: American Library Association. Wilson, James Q. (1989). What government agencies do and why they do it. New York: Basic Books. Zweizig, Douglas, & Rodger, Eleanor J. (1982). Output measures for public libraries. Chicago: American Library Association.