Topic 5: Conducting a SWOT

SWOT was mentioned in the previous section as a means to collect data. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This strategy can be used as a brainstorming activity or in a more sophisticated way to analyze data. Each category forces you to consider different avenues of data collection. Consider the following questions to initiate the SWOT process, provided by Mind Tools, a management and leadership training site (2018).

Strengths

• What advantages does your library have?
• What do you do better than anyone else?
• What unique or lowest-cost resources can you draw upon that others can't?
• What do people in your community see as your strengths?
• What is currently working and why?

Weaknesses

• What could you improve?
• What should you avoid?
• What are people in your community likely to see as weaknesses?
• What factors lose you patrons?

Opportunities

• What good opportunities can you spot?
• What interesting trends are you aware of?
• Where do you have support to grow upon?
• What community partners can you utilize?
• Where is there need?

Threats

• What obstacles do you face?
• What are your competitors doing?
• Are standards or specifications for your library's programs or services changing?
• Is changing technology or lack of current technology preventing improvement?
• Do you have trouble in funding activities/programs/resources?
• Could any of your weaknesses seriously threaten your library?

Activity: Watch this video provided by Lynda.com about conducting a SWOT analysis. At the conclusion of the video, the presenter suggests conducting your own exercise. He asks, "Think of a problem that you're facing in your library and what are the solutions that you're considering. Try doing a SWOT analysis for that solution. What are the strengths? What are the weaknesses?"