Community analysis: an instrument for planning services

Abstract

The evolution of recent decades of Italian literature on librarianship has accustomed us to the concept of a library centred on the user, to the practice of listening to the needs of those to whom the service is destined, to sensitivity with regard to the characteristics of the user basin which the library addresses. The first management studies and the first works of evaluation of the services and user satisfaction were developed within this area of reflection.
However attention to the user and the necessity of a deep knowledge of him have never gone much further than statements of principle and have still not found in Italy a real methodological collocation within the more complex process of the planning of resources and services. All this in spite of the fact that there is extensive Anglo-American literature on these matters and numerous requests in this direction.
A confirmation of the importance of the process of analysis of the users as a part of programming activity comes from the new IFLA's Guidelines for public libraries, which acknowledge a central role in the programming of the services of a library for that activity that is known as “community analysis" and which can be defined as the process of the systematic collection, organization, analysis and summary of the information relative to a particular community.
As a research methodology, community analysis is used by various disciplines and organizational areas within the vast category of social sciences. This disciplinary origin probably favoured the natural transfer of the relative contents into Anglo-American librarianship which, as is well known, is considered disciplinarily as belonging precisely to the social sciences, and has rather kept Italian librarians at a distance for a long time.
The aim of community analysis consists in evaluating the needs of a community and comparing them with the services offered by a supply service in order to identify the gaps, to provide support in the decisional process and suggest indications for satisfying the needs of the users/clients. In the specific case of libraries, the process focuses on the information requirements of the potential users.
Today, with information needs becoming more complex and resources more numerous and articulate, new approaches must be identified for guaranteeing the provision of information services that are custom made for the users.
In Italian literature on librarianship the theme of the user and his needs became a central one starting from the Eighties. However, it is rare that the studies produced state that they are inspired by the methodology of community analysis.
Nevertheless, even in Italy there is now a tendency to recover the centrality of this evaluation method, which is therefore necessary to rediscover and analyze. There is a particular necessity to reinterpret the sources (not just of librarianship) and to identify, at methodological level, an Italian path to community analysis.
On the other hand it is considered essential that there should be a careful consideration of the problems and future prospects of this instrument, in order to avoid that, as has happened other times within the Italian context, tendencies or fashions are followed, without their deep significance and importance for the management of the library being understood.
Therefore the contents and methodology of community analysis will continue to be illustrated on the one hand while on the other the problems and opportunities linked to an integration of this new instrument in the evaluative course of Italian libraries will continue to be examined.