Last year, we focused on the past. Our 100 Year Celebration gave us an opportunity to reflect on our history and our place in the community. But it also gave us a chance to consider what the future holds for Orange County Library System.
We’ve always been confident that there’s a bright future ahead for our library system, but we needed a new road map. So last year, with the help of our staff, our customers and our community, we embarked on a journey to build a new strategic plan that reframes our approach to library service to reflect what’s important to us today.
Over the past nine months, we have held focus groups and listening sessions, sent surveys and asked for feedback from our community. We’ve asked you to tell us what you think we do well, and what we can be doing differently. After reviewing the information we received from thousands of users, we crafted a new strategic plan that has four pillars to guide us to become more welcoming, more connected, more forward-thinking and more empowered to help the people who use our services daily.
So, what does this look like?
When we talk about being Welcoming, we want to provide excellent customer service, create inviting spaces, and ensure accessibility so the community feels welcome at OCLS.
When we talk about being Connected, we want to promote engagement, facilitate partnerships, and generate awareness of what OCLS does.
To be Forward-Thinking, we want to provide and explore services and technology to deliver relevant experiences for the community.
And we want our staff to be Empowered. We will enhance our employee training structure, support professional development, and improve internal communication so OCLS staff are adaptable to community needs.
This is just the blueprint for how we’ll shape our services in the years ahead. Our talented and passionate staff will be working hard to fill in the details and turn the strategic plan into a living document that will help us fulfill our purpose statement – the “why” of what we do:
Enriching lives through experiences and opportunities to learn, grow, and connect.
We’re also making a couple of other big changes. On October 1, we rebranded with a new logo adapted from the special logo created for our 100 Year Celebration, which was the perfect bridge between the old OCLS and the new.
We’ve also changed our website URL from ocls.info to ocls.org – a small change that many people won’t notice, but that positions our website among other nonprofit and government agencies with a familiar and reputable .org extension. If you’ve bookmarked pages from our former URL, not to worry – we’ve kept the old website running in the background, and you will be automatically redirected to your destination.
Want to share your thoughts about our new look or strategic plan? Please don’t hesitate to email us at comments@ocls.org.
