Firstly, I want to thank everyone who took the time to complete our Libraries Fit for the Future survey which ran throughout the spring and early part of this summer. More than 1,500 of you got in touch and gave us your views on Cumberland’s Library Service, with many more taking part in workshops with our staff.
While the project team are still going through the responses in fine detail, a quick glance at the feedback shows there’s lots of positive opinions of the library service and how we operate, with particular praise for the staff, as well as plenty of food for thought on what could be improved in the future.
As I said, the team are still working through the responses at the moment, but it’s clear that we all share the same goal: We really value our library service and want it to be the best it possibly can be.
Since the survey closed at the beginning of July, the team have been reading the feedback, doing some number crunching and trying to identify the trends, all while taking the time to read the longer, more qualitative answers provided.
What happens next, you ask? Well, throughout the rest of the summer that work of going through the results will continue. This work is being combined with analysis of things like demographic data to better understand Cumberland’s current and future need.
Once that’s happened, we’ll be exploring ideas and options on how the library service could be developed during the autumn and assessing what we can do within our resources. We will be sharing ideas for developing with the service with our stakeholders and residents to get feedback before making any significant changes to our library services. Where there are quick wins identified we’ll get them actioned so we start making improvement straight away where we can.
There have been lots of really good ideas put forward (and some more ‘out there’ ones too!) and while we won’t be able to take on every suggestion, we’ll do our best to design the library service that reflects what people want from it now – and importantly in the future.
Thanks,
Cllr Anne Quilter