Print

Descriptions of the Power Tools for Planners

Tool 1: Select Your Facilitator: Do you need a facilitator? If so, what kind of facilitator? Where might you find a facilitator? This tool includes a decision tree to help you begin the process of determining who should facilitate your planning process, a complete list of your possible choices, and a detailed explanation of the pros and cons of each of your options.

Tool 2: Plan to Plan: What are the steps in the planning process? How long do they take to complete? When will you start the planning process? How much will the process cost? This tool includes an interactive planning calendar and a budget spreadsheet. As you make your decisions they will be recorded on Plan to Plan summary sheet, which you can print and use to guide your process.

Tool 3: Service Reponses: Do you and your staff want to know more about the 13 library service responses? Do you need electronic copies of the complete text of all of the service responses for your committee and staff to review? This tool provides links to five to eight library Web sites that highlight each of the service responses and includes downloadable machine-readable copies of all the complete text of all of the library service responses.

Tools 4 and 5: Writing Goals and Objectives: Have you and your staff had trouble writing goals and objectives in the past? Do you find yourself arguing about semantics and not content. These two tools demystify writing goals and objectives. They include automatic goal and objective generators – you fill in the blanks, press a button, and your goal or objective is displayed. You can make any changes you want and then save and print the final product.

Tools 6 and 7: Write Your Plan: What are the five key characteristics of effective plans? How can you be sure your final plan is effective? These two tools focus on writing your final plan. The first tool gives you a chance to actually edit sections of real plans and then to compare your editing suggestions with those of experts. The second tool includes links to a number of plans on the Web, so that you can compare your final plan with plans developed by other libraries.

Downloadable, electronic versions of all of the workforms used in the PLA Results publications are available free at http://e-learnlibraries.mrooms.net/.

Click here to register for Power Tools for Planners

Click here to return to the main e-Learning @ PLA page