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Quality management, guidelines and standards
Quality management, guidelines and standards
In 1987, the Dutch public libraries lost their Library Act. From that moment on, responsibility and funding for local libraries was decentralised to the municipalities. Only two areas, co-operation between local libraries within a region and library fees for children, remained regulated by a law which includes other cultural components (Wet op het Specifiek Cultuurbeleid). From this time on, libraries began negotiating with their own local governments about their mission, guidelines and standards.
This development had, amongst positive effects, two negative results:
1. Local libraries on their own had insufficient power for innovation and re-thinking of the mission of the library in line with new developments in society;
2. the quality, mission and service of the libraries became very different in accordance with different local policies.
The realisation of these problems led to a deeper analysis of the situation and to the formulation of three targets:
1. Libraries should co-operate more and in better ways to improve the innovative power of the public library network as a whole;
2. the library should move from being library-oriented to being user-oriented. This means giving priority to the development of marketing tools, expertise and surveys.
3. Priority for ICT.
To achieve the first target, NBLC began the project Co-operation and Quality (Samenhang en kwaliteit). The aim was to improve the quality of the public library by working together, as it is impossible for every library to offer a full service to everyone working on your own. The division of tasks between libraries in a region or even countrywide is therefore necessary. But this makes each library dependent on the other libraries. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
There must be some way of ensuring that the quality of services throughout the network is of a certain standard. That is why we have begun to establish rules and standards for all public libraries. So far, five guidelines have been accepted by all libraries. These are:
1. Level of service. This guideline includes standards about opening hours, public Internet services, etc. The guideline does not lay down any quantitative standard for the collection, but says that the collection policy should be part of the marketing policy and should meet the needs of the local population served by the library.
2. Professionalisation of the service, which describes not only formal educational qualifications but also informal requirements.
3. Standardisation of digital equipment.
4. Financing countrywide promotion. Each library pays pro capita for this promotion.
5. Quality management and certification. The libraries have all chosen the same model for self-evaluation from the Institute for Dutch Quality. It has a special model for non-profit organisations and is the Dutch translation of the model from the European Foundation of Quality Management. This year, every library will undertake a short analysis of the whole organisation according to the model. Based on the results, each library will then make a plan to improve on any areas which are shown by the analysis to be lacking. Libraries are also conducting a user-survey this year, based on a model made by NBLC. Certification implies some sort of external auditing. NBLC is currently in discussion with the association of Dutch municipalities to formulate the audit criteria.
Contactperson: Ms Mieke van den Besselaar:
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3 April 2026
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