PLA 2012: Tell Me Something I Don't Know

Joan Frye Williams and George Needham presented this program which focused primarily on what public librarians can do to foster more meaningful community engagement. However, since I work for the Western MD Regional Library where my civilians/stakeholders are my library colleagues in Allegany, Garrett and Washington counties ... I kept translating their valuable points into terms that I can apply here - most of which are just questions to think about. For example:

1. Joan and George made an excellent point that library employees need to come to grips with what the public actually wants and not what we think they should want. This isn't anything new but how many of us actually follow through? In terms of the regional, are we falling into this trap as well? Are we imposing what we think the counties' library systems should do/know/provide or are we really listening and giving them what they want so they can do their jobs to the best of their abilities?
   
2. The biggest statement they made and it's more or less a restatement of the aforementioned point, was, "it's not the community's job to understand the library; it's the library's job to understand the community." Do we at the Regional really understand our customers in the three counties or are our perceptions of ourselves and each other skewed? How can we tell?
   

The biggest take-away for me what their suggestions on how to get insightful information from the community and I would like to try and apply these suggestions to the 2012 Training Needs Assessment which will be launched in another 2-3 weeks. In order to get useful, applicable, act-on-it-now information they said:

1. Ask what the community values. It's much easier for folks to talk about what they care about in real time than to speculate on what they might care about in the future (i.e. what are your current training/education concerns)
2. Ask what results the community wants. Results are tangible - much like the way effective learning objectives should be. (i.e. What functions do you want to be able to perform in Outlook?)
3. Ask what challenges they're facing and how they'd like to see them resolved (i.e. I have difficulty completing my staff's performance evaluations because I don't know what feedback I can give them that would be helpful and it seems as though there's not much importance put on the reviews. Ideally, I'd like evaluation time to be a team effort that isn't a chore and that provides two-way feedback that is somehow tied to rewards).
   

What are your thoughts on this? Do you agree/disagree? Why? How would you like to see the Regional's Training Needs Assessment handled? I'd love to hear your suggestions!