Reading Resolutions for Library Staff via NoveList Blog and How I Suggest You Use Them for Team Building and Goal Setting

We are approaching the middle of the second month of 2025, but it is not too late to make some reading resolutions for the year, especially if you are making them with your staff.

I wrote extensively about reading resolutions in general and mine in particular here back at the beginning of January. However, that post was focused on making some plans for yourself. Now that the year is in full swing and you have all taken the time to asses your 2024 and make personal plans for 2025, let's expand our goal setting and look at what we want to accomplish as a team.

And what do I mean by team? Well it depends on your library. For small libraries with only a handful of staff, we should think of the entire staff-- from maintenance to director-- as our "team." For medium libraries, "team" might mean those at public service desks. For large systems, "team" might be already defined in your structure. 

But I would argue, no matter your library's size, if you are really willing to embrace the RA for All mentality at your library. you can follow this excellent example set by Champaign (IL) Public Library's RA Working Group-- an example of working together that I love so much, I added it to my newly renovated 10 Rules.

When you are working on goals for a team, you need to begin the conversation fairly broadly and then work together to rein it in. This is why I really like the three resolutions for library staff that Novelist posted on their blog. This goals are:

#1: Join a Reading Challenge
#2: Explore a New Genre
#3: Learn Something New About Working with Readers

Click through to read the post with a longer description about each goal and how you can implement it.

But what I like about these 3 goals is that they set an achievable standard to begin discussing what you want to accomplish as a team. You can take these broad categories and decide how you are going to attack them. Do you all do the same reading challenge, with the same monthly goals or instead do you let people pick their own challenge and use the different experiences as a talking point at staff meetings or in online spaces? 

I love the idea of the entire staff exploring a genre together over the course of a year. While I was working a desk, I was involved in a genre study with ARRT at all times. 

And the final one is vital. We should always be learning something new about working with readers. I have been doing this for the entire century, taught a graduate level course on RA for 8 years, and am a national expert-- and even I strive to learn something new about working with readers....every day. But, this is a very amorphous goal. This one you need to talk about as a team and decide how you are going to do this one.

Will you hire someone like me to train you? Will you take advantage of free webinars from Booklist, NoveList, your local systems, etc...? Or will you pick a specific topic and search out training or assign tasks to have your staff dig into resources and then share out with each other? 

This last goal is my favorite because it requires you work together to figure out how you will address it for your readers. And that is the larger point of this entire post. Working together is the overall goal here. Team building through shared learning, setting goals together and working to reach them, all with the same purpose of better serving your leisure readers-- this will make you stronger as an organization.

Goal setting for yourself is important and can be done alone, but you will not get better at serving readers at your library without working together. Not only does this allow you to cover more ground (spreading the load) but it offers opportunities from everyone to learn from each other. And, your service to your readers will improve as a result.

Click here to read the NoveList post and use the guidance there to begin crafting a plan for your "team." Yes it is mid-February, but it is not too late to set some 2025 staff goals.