In my last post, I promised to share some important principles that should underly the creation of policy in the library. Please note that I don’t pretend this is an exhaustive list — and I welcome suggestions of additional ones. But I believe all of the following are fundamentally important:

The first is one that I touched on briefly in that last post: good policies are based on strategic organizational needs, not on individual personalities. In every library, there will be a temptation either to forego creating a policy because the people currently in place don’t seem to need it, or to create one specifically for the purpose of solving a problem with an individual employee. In both cases, the temptation is to let personality drive policy — which is always a mistake. Personalities change as personnel change; good policies are grounded in principles that remain consistent over time.

Another principle that should always inform policy formation and maintenance arises from the question of whether the library and its patrons would benefit more from consistency or from flexibility in a particular regard. For example, when it comes to library hours, everyone usually benefits from consistency; when it comes to employee dress expectations, everyone may benefit more from flexibility. Policies are always a tool for providing consistency. In areas where you want to preserve flexibility, avoid creating a policy.

Another purely pragmatic principle is this one: a good policy resolves more problems than it creates. Rest assured that every policy will create problems — hopefully minor ones, but there will always be a problem. The policy will liberate some people and frustrate others; it will expose issues in the organization that no one anticipated; it will lead to new questions no one thought of. The same will be true when you eliminate an existing policy. So when considering establishing a new policy or eliminating an old one, the important question is not “will this lead to problems?”, because the answer to that question is always yes. The important question will be: how likely is it that this course of action will solve more problems (or more important problems) than it creates?

One important function of a policy is to locate authority — in other words, a policy should always make clear who is responsible for what. A good policy puts authority where it belongs — which may be with a particular individual, or with a unit, or with the library (i.e. the library administration). Generally speaking, you want to push decision-making down to the lowest feasible organizational level, but determining what “lowest feasible” means will be an ongoing effort in every library.

The last principle I want to invoke here is sort of a meta-policy principle: policies should be set according to a consistent and principle-based practice of policy creation and maintenance. In other words, every library needs a “policy of policies” that answers questions like:

• Who can set policy at the unit and organizational levels?
• When two policies are in conflict, how will we decide which one prevails?
• When someone wants to propose a new policy (or the revocation of an old one), is it clear how they can do that?
• When someone proposes a new policy, what happens?
• How are new policies (or the revocation of old ones) communicated to the library and, as applicable, to its patrons?

What other principles have you found to be important when it comes to policy creation in your library? Comments welcome.