As MCLS Executive Director, I lead staff who truly care about providing the best possible services and value to libraries, including through partnerships with other organizations and the many vendors we work with. The investment you make in MCLS in terms of membership and/or the time you spend working and communicating with our staff is invaluable to us as an organization. We don’t take that investment and the relationships it fosters for granted – without those things, we wouldn’t exist. I say often that “relationships are everything at MCLS,” and I really mean that. We strive to maintain relationships that are as positive and productive as possible, and part of how our current strategic plan guides us to do that is to gather input about how we’re doing and how we might improve.  

Over the past few years, many in the MCLS community have provided helpful feedback about their experience working with us in a variety of ways, from consulting and other evaluations to our 2023-2024 strategic planning process and our Board’s member survey in fall 2025. This month, we are launching a new annual survey for member libraries and our partners and vendors to establish baseline data about how well we are achieving the objectives in our current strategic plan and where we can improve. We will use the survey data to inform how we make decisions and allocate resources toward achieving our objectives over time in terms of our Key Strategic Priorities of Engagement and Collaboration, Invest In Innovation (TALK libraries only for our 2026 survey), Strengthen and Support, and Awareness and Accountability.  

Our survey will proceed along two tracks: one for member libraries, and another for partners and vendors.  

• Members will receive a link to a survey built in Qualtrics from our partners at the Indiana University Center for Survey Research on April 14. In many cases, we are sending a survey link to more than one person per member library (i.e., the member representative, the alternate representative, and others in the library who have used MCLS’s services). We encourage all who receive a survey link to respond so that we may have the most data possible.  

• Partners and vendors will receive a link to a survey built in SurveyMonkey by the MCLS staff, also on April 14. As with our member survey, we may send a survey link to multiple people per organization, and we encourage everyone who receives a link to respond.  

Both surveys will close May 15, and we expect to have data compiled by the end of June to review during summer 2026. 

The survey will include some rating questions as well as some open-ended questions, including several near the end that I’ll ask you to think about before you receive a link: 

• What do you value about MCLS? 

• How could MCLS improve? 

• Tell us a story about an impact MCLS made on you or your library. 

• What might you tell someone who is considering membership in MCLS or considering using MCLS’s services? 

The survey should take about 10-15 minutes to complete, and we hope you’ll take the time to answer as many open-ended questions as possible. We value your unique perspective and encourage your honest input.  

Our staff and I thank you in advance for investing the time to take our survey. Together, we will continue navigating MCLS toward making a positive impact on the library community.  

If you have questions about what we’re doing and why, please contact me at garrisons@mcls.org. In the meantime, thank you again for providing us with your very important input about how MCLS is doing for libraries and our partners and vendors, and how we might improve for you.