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There are times when you may feel swamped in policies! Library policies are broad statements of your institution's position used to set guidelines for services and to manage more effectively. Your policies may focus on overall operations or on departmental functions; they are more general than, but may include, rules and procedures.

Often times, a new library policy is reactive. It may come as a result of a recurring problem that needs to be formally addressed. A new policy may anticipate a future need or a change in the library's environment (e.g., financial, technological, demographic, or physical). The impetus for a new policy or a revision in policy may originate from the library, from the community, from trustees, or from local government.

No matter the origin or issue, library policies:

  • Support your mission,
  • Communicate library philosophy,
  • Set direction,
  • Achieve management goals,
  • Provide consistency,
  • Delegate staff authority and responsibility,
  • Guide decision-making.

Although policies should be flexible enough to allow for some latitude in interpretation, they provide library users/stakeholders with the same consistent answers and the same treatment. Written policies empower staff to make decisions. They delineate the lines of authority within your library organization and clarify relationships among library administration, library departments, trustees, and municipal officials.

In writing a new policy or in considering modifications in an existent policy, your goal is to make certain that the policy is:

  • Clearly written,
  • Openly discussed with staff and trustees,
  • Based on good library practice and peer benchmarking,
  • Built on already existent policies.

As you finalize your library policy:

  • Get advice with any legal issues,
  • Gain approval of your governing body,
  • Communicate policy elements and rationale to staff,
  • Implement your policy with rules and procedures.

One final note: The policy writing process does not stop here. Revisions are a constant. Remember to review all your policies on a regular basis and update them as questions or problems arise that were not addressed, as your environment changes, or as your goals change. Make sure that existing policies do not conflict with your new policy. Remember to delete outdated policies!

As a policy-writing example, let's consider an issue that has been in the forefront of librarians' minds. An environmental change that may have you reassessing your library's privacy policy is the USA PATRIOT Act. One section of the PATRIOT Act expanded the scope of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Under the PATRIOT Act, a FISA judge may rule to grant a law enforcement request to collect any relevant tangible item in pursuit of terrorist activities. Pre-PATRIOT Act, the FISA language specified access to business records of particular types of industries, e.g., airlines and car rental agencies. Now the reach is broadened to include the types of records held by libraries, among them circulation and electronic communications records. In addition, language in the PATRIOT Act supercedes state confidentiality laws as they apply to libraries and patron privacy.

In securing the court order, law enforcement needs merely to cite reason to believe that the person under investigation is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power, rather than the former probable cause of such. Since the FISA Court is a secret proceeding, librarians must not disclose the fact that an order was served on their library.

What's a library to do? Think about the goals of your new policy. It must:

  • Protect patron privacy,
  • Create an awareness of the implications of the PATRIOT Act for your library users,
  • Respond within the law.

Your policy should address these elements:

  • The library is a place for information and learning.
  • Library users know what to expect vis-á-vis privacy and the limits of privacy in a technological age.
  • Guidelines are in place for staff to respond to law enforcement. (Here are some examples of procedures that you might add:
    • A chain of command for response is defined.
    • All staff members, including part-time workers and student employees, know to whom they should refer law enforcement orders.
    • All judicial process requests are checked for validity.
    • The director or a senior staff member monitors any search process and receives from the law enforcement officials an inventory of information or items seized.)
  • Your library has and adheres to a records control and retention schedule for circulation and interlibrary loan transactions, as well as for any Internet login information or sign-up sheets that you require.

For more help see ALA's Guidelines for Librarians on the USA PATRIOT Act.

The Massachusetts Regional Library Systems collect policies on a variety of topics from Massachusetts libraries. Here are some privacy and PATRIOT Act examples: http://www.cmrls.org/policies/patriotact.html.

For further information on writing library policy, these references are available in the NMRLS professional collection:

Larson, Jeanette and Hermann L. Totten. Model Policies for Small and Medium Public Libraries. New York: Neal-Schuman, 1998.

Stueart, Robert D. and Barbara B. Moran. Library and Information Center Management. 4th ed. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1993.

Weingand, Darlene E. Administration of the Small Public Library. 4th ed. Chicago: ALA, 2001.