Your First 90 Days: What to Skip, Not Just What to Do

This is sized for one person, in stolen hours. Being honest about what to skip is as important as the list of what to do.

You'll be tempted to announce a program. Don't — inventory before announcing, and at one-librarian scale, being honest about what you're not going to get to yet is part of the job, not a failure of it.

Week 1: the free things

Publish or fix your accessibility statement, and be honest in it about which parts of your collection you control directly and which are licensed platforms you don't. Confirm your complaint route reaches you or a monitored mailbox, and test it. Open the intake log — and set the real rule for this sector: log it the day you hear it, whatever channel it arrived by, including a patron telling you at the desk. That's the most common complaint channel a library actually has, and it's the one most likely to go unrecorded if you don't build the habit now.

Weeks 2-4: find out what you actually own — and what you license

Your own documents — catalogs, program calendars, board minutes — are the tractable part. Inventory them, but don't stop there: list every licensed platform separately, since that's most of what patrons actually touch. Ebook apps, databases, the discovery layer, the events platform, the PC-booking system. You're not going to remediate any of it yourself. You're going to know exactly what it is, which is the prerequisite for everything else in this series.

Weeks 3-4: find out who renews contracts, and when

At this scale it might be you, or it might be a consortium acting on your behalf. Either way, get the accessibility clause language ready before the next renewal, not after. A consortium negotiating for two hundred libraries carries leverage a single branch never will — find out if yours already has standard language, and use it.

Month 2: build the gate that actually fits your scale

A pre-publication check for anything you post yourself, sized to take minutes, not a formal workflow. And start requesting documentation from vendors at renewal, even if you can't act on all of it yet — the habit of asking is what turns "small library, no program" into "small library, honest program" later.

Month 2: meet your local disability organization

One conversation with actual patrons who use assistive technology will tell you more than a lot of scanning. If your community doesn't have a dedicated organization, your state library association or regional library cooperative likely has contacts who do.

Month 3: triage what's yours, document what isn't, make the ask

Triage your own documents using the same two-gate approach as every sector in this series. For licensed platforms, write down the accommodation path for known gaps — often interlibrary loan, staff-mediated search, or the vendor's own accessibility support line — and disclose it honestly in your public statement. Then take one page to whoever holds your budget, even if that's a library board rather than a department head: what exists, what it costs, what happens at three funding levels.

If you only do four things: publish an honest statement, log every complaint the day you hear it, get accessibility language into your next renewal, and check new content before you post it. Almost none of it costs money, and together it closes most of the exposure a small library actually faces.

This isn't legal advice on which deadlines apply to your specific library's corporate form — verify against your own counsel. If you want a fast first look at how a specific page holds up, ask Luke to check it. Our accessibility statement shows this same discipline applied to our own site.

Previous: the law behind the job · Next: document inventory and triage

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Sources: 28 CFR Part 35, Subpart H — Web and Mobile Accessibility (opens in new window) · Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 (opens in new window) · Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR) overview (opens in new window) · DOJ guidance on web accessibility and the ADA (opens in new window)