Without ongoing attention, critical content resources can become outdated or irrelevant, rendering them less efficient at best, useless at worst. Here’s how to develop and implement a plan to maintain your learning library.

Most of us understand the value of maintenance in our personal lives. We know that the time and money we spend on regular oil changes keeps our cars running well and helps us avoid costly future repairs. We know that simple periodic medical tests like blood pressure checks can save us from serious health complications in later years.

But for some reason, many people don’t apply those same principles to major corporate investments, including learning libraries. Lack of time, limited staff resources, and other priorities are among the reasons many training professionals put maintenance at the bottom of the department’s to-do list.

But maintenance of your learning library should be near the top of your list. You’re doing your department, your company, and its employees a major disservice if you don’t develop and execute a maintenance strategy. Without ongoing attention, critical content resources can become outdated or irrelevant, rendering them less efficient at best, useless at worst.

Start with a plan

The starting point for any maintenance strategy is the development of a plan. Think of the maintenance plan you get when you purchase a new car. The plan includes minor and major maintenance tasks--from changing the oil and rotating the tires to installing a new timing belt. Those tasks are performed at scheduled intervals throughout the car’s life.

Maintenance of a learning library is similar. By designing a plan comprised of minor and major tasks performed over the course of a year, you’ll save your department from intense, all-consuming, and unscheduled maintenance projects, as well as unexpected expenses. Additionally, the ongoing execution of a maintenance plan can generate heightened awareness of your learning program among company executives and business unit leaders and continually reinforce the program’s strategic value.

There is no one-size-fits-all maintenance plan. Library size, topic breadth, content types, and staff resources are among the factors you should consider in developing a plan. You’ll also need to consider content expiration dates and technology license agreements, your company’s budget cycle, and certification or compliance deadlines.

You can organize the tasks associated with library maintenance into four main steps:

• review content
• assess effectiveness
• evaluate accessibility
• check technology

Review content

The heart of any learning program is its content. No matter how deftly marketed or well supported by technology, a learning program will fail if the right content isn’t included. After all, how long would any bookstore stay in business if its books were not of interest to customers?

Project management	January
Finance & accounting	March
Networking	April
Programming	May
IT certification programs	July
Customer service	September

You could also organize a content review schedule based on content type. Here's an example of this approach.

Category	Review Deadline
Contracted seminars	November
Online business coursware	January-February
Online IT courseware	March
Corporate library	April
Background internal documents (white papers, backgrounders, PowerPoint slides, and so forth)	May
Custom content (online and instructor-led)	July-August

As with all steps discussed here, reviewing your library’s content is an ongoing process. Business and learning needs continually change, new off-the-shelf solutions are always coming on the market, and some content will become outdated over time. You’ll want to set up a content review plan that takes into account all of those factors. Determining milestone goals will help you plan your work.

You should check with senior management periodically to ensure that the content offered in your library supports short- and long-term business goals. For example, if your company goes through a major annual planning and budget process, it’s a good idea to schedule one or more meetings with executives after that process. You and your team can use the time to reinforce the relationship between employee learning and business strategy. And, if new content is required to support new goals, you’ll probably have a better chance of getting money for purchases into your budget.

You’ll also want to meet with various business unit leaders periodically to verify that available content continues to meet the departments’ learning needs. At all of those meetings, you’ll want to provide as much information as you take away. Come armed with learner feedback, stats on usage, anecdotes that illustrate value, valuation measurements, and other information. Use the meetings as opportunities to brainstorm and collaborate.

Depending on your library’s size, you may find it expedient to divide it into categories for content review. By setting review dates throughout the year for each category, you can predict and control the resources required and better manage the overall review process. Ideally, you’ll want to time reviews to support critical department training needs, as well as any pending contract deadlines. The chart below shows an example of how the review process can be organized.

Category	Review deadline
Sales	November
Other resources	September

No matter what approach you take, detailed content review should cover elements such as business requirements, certification or regulatory requirements, information depth and quality, and instructional design.

The content review process should involve members of your training staff as well as subject matter experts (SMEs). You’ll want to seek out SMEs who know the subject area, are available and committed to learning, and who view their participation in the process as an extension of their jobs and professional responsibilities. SMEs are valuable resources who are typically hard to recruit and even harder to keep. You can facilitate their involvement and maximize their time by developing written review plans outlining the tasks required of all team members, documenting start and end dates, and outlining the type of deliverables and input you’re expecting from each member.

Assess effectiveness

It’s important to get periodic assessments on the value of your library’s content from three important audiences: your learners, their managers, and the company’s executive leaders. Your library’s long-term success depends on the positive perception of all three audiences.

Ways to collect learner feedback include evaluations, surveys, interviews, and email correspondence. Probably the best approach is one that combines multiple methods and varying frequencies. Examples include course evaluations completed at the end of the training, periodic surveys that solicit feedback on relevance and value of learning resources, and in-depth learner interviews.

You can also use surveys and interviews (or one-on-one meetings) to collect feedback from supervisors and managers on their perception of your learning program and its impact on employee performance. Feedback from this group is often more difficult to collect-- time constraints, job pressures, and other factors will often cause your information requests to be shoved to the bottom of the to-do list. But keep at it. Chances are, people will become more responsive to you over time, once they’ve seen how the feedback is used.

Getting feedback on the value of content from senior executives is most difficult. If you’re fortunate, you’ll have execs who use the library resources. Otherwise, the opinions of senior executives could be formed by conversations with or emails from direct reports and other employees. Obviously, the more direct experience executive leaders have with your learning program and the more you keep them abreast of it, the more informed their perceptions will be.

Just as important as collecting feedback is analyzing and presenting the information. Too often we spend time and energy on the collection process only to let the information sit and grow stale. You should determine how you can quantify and analyze feedback so you can draw sound, meaningful conclusions and identify trends that can influence future content choices. Feedback mechanisms should be designed to provide the type of information you need for such analysis. Use audience feedback in conjunction with other data--such as statistics on usage, accessed resources, course completions, earned certifications, most popular courses, and employee performance against benchmarks and objectives--to help round out your analyses and tell the full story of your content’s value.

Finally, and equally important, communicate your results to your audiences. By periodically publishing results and analyses, you’ll show people the importance of their feedback. Never let an opportunity go by to associate new investments, new selections, or other changes to feedback or suggestions.

Evaluate accessibility

Another important step in library maintenance is monitoring the accessibility and availability of library content to learners. Do you have long wait lists? Are key resources always checked out? Do you have requests for training that are going unmet?

If you rely on the Internet for delivery of some content, consider how easily your learners can access it. Do they have connectivity or bandwidth issues? (That’s assuming they have easy access to computers!) Do they have the time to take advantage of learning resources available to them? The answers to those questions are typically not found in course evaluations or exit surveys. You’ll need to be creative in soliciting input to determine how efficiently your learning content is being accessed and used.

One source of information is the administrative metrics associated with your physical operations, such as library facilities. Another tool is likely to be right in front of you--your own computer. Learning managers are often so focused on making things happen that they forget to test-drive their programs. Assuming your computer is comparable to those typically used by your learners, your experience will likely mirror your learners’ experiences and yield valuable insights. Finally, your e-learning administrator or IT department can be a valuable source of data regarding server uptime, application access, and other related metrics to help you determine access trends.

Check technology

In most organizations, technology and the Internet in particular play a critical role in the deployment and support of learning programs. For Web-based courses, online resources, virtual classrooms, and discussion groups, learner accessibility is directly related to a company’s technology infrastructure. You must keep abreast of technology changes that potentially affect your learning program so you can plan accordingly. And you’ll need to work closely with IT when your learning program requires infrastructure changes.

You should schedule periodic meetings with IT executives to discuss any planned changes or issues related to the organization’s desktop computing environment, network architecture, security, and systems integration. Prepare for those meetings by collecting information that could be helpful in IT planning. That could include usage statistics to show peak access and distribution of employees accessing courses; user feedback on access time, download time, and other suggestions that illustrate for IT the learner experience; and any technology issues that might be relevant to future planned purchases or projects.

By establishing an ongoing partnership with IT, you can better plan future purchases. For instance, if you’ve identified content you want to add to your library that incorporates streaming media, you must find out if your company’s infrastructure can easily support it. If not, you’ll want to know if there are any long-range IT plans that might change the situation. The IT department can also be an excellent source of information on issues affecting the learning market such as SCORM and Section 508 accessibility.

By proactively keeping your department visible to IT and demonstrating that IT employees’ efforts are appreciated and valued, you’ll be able to plan more effectively and likely get s better response when a problem occurs. Don’t make the mistake of communicating with IT only when you have a complaint or an urgent request.

The key to library maintenance is understanding that a content library is always a work in progress. Course content will continually need to change to address new business needs and new subject matter. Learning priorities will change with new company and management direction. Supporting technologies will always evolve.

No matter what the size of your library, your plans must treat maintenance as a critical and ongoing task and a prerequisite to ongoing success. While some of the steps outlined here may seem daunting or time-consuming initially, you’ll find they actually will save you time, win supporters, and help you make better decisions about your library’s content.

Published: July 2003