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DPL's VISION |
To be the leading information and analysis resource for the Australian Parliament.
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DPL's MISSION |
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DPL's VALUES |
In addition to the Parliamentary Service Values established by the Parliamentary Service Act 1999, DPL has the following values:
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Excellence in Service |
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| Confidentiality | Impartiality |
| Cost-effectiveness | Continuous Development |
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CORPORATE OBJECTIVES |
The Department of the Parliamentary Library (DPL) has a single outcome and provides information services, research and policy analysis to the Parliament using two outputs:
Output 1 comprises:
Output 2 comprises:
DPL aims to provide information services at the client’s desktop using the parliamentary and extended parliamentary networks to provide relevant, accurate, timely and useful data 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
The majority of client services provided to Senators, Members and parliamentary committees are confidential and are provided directly by DPL staff to the client making the request. While individual Senators and Members appreciate and value this work, much of it is not attributable to the Library.
The Library Committees of the two Houses meet jointly and consider monthly reports on the Parliamentary Library’s activities and management, ensuring that accountability to the Parliament is detailed and continuous.
Request numbers are expected to decline slightly compared with previous years, but the complexity of, and time taken to complete, the majority of individual requests is expected to continue to increase.
The Parliamentary Library’s strategy of developing self-help services is having an impact on the number of requests received. An increasing range of key documents and sources are loaded onto the Library’s databases so that they can be searched for and retrieved through desktop computers in Senators’ and Members’ offices, both in Parliament House and in electorates, extending the availability of these services beyond the Library’s opening hours. The success of the self-help services strategy is evident by the increased use of these services on both the internal network and through the Parliament’s web site. (See page 20).
These trends are leading Senators, Members and parliamentary committees to make greater use of the Parliamentary Library’s value-added functions of analysis, interpretation, commentary and comparative assessment; rather than seeing the Parliamentary Library principally as a source of basic data.
Assessing the department’s performance in a statistical or otherwise quantitative sense is, given the nature of the environment, extremely difficult.
To improve resource management, the department will be linking its existing financial and human resources management systems and its new work recording system to an integrated departmental management system from 1 July 2001. This will enable DPL to have a greater capability to calculate output prices and to monitor performance and resource allocation more effectively.
The nature of the parliamentary cycle has substantial impact on the business pattern of the Parliamentary Library. Whilst the budget estimates for 2001–02 and forward years have been prepared on the basis required by the Department of Finance and Administration, so that they have no operating surplus or deficit shown for each financial year, the business cycle for the parliamentary departments is impacted by sitting patterns and election timing. For example, DPL increases its overall staffing in peak sitting periods to meet the changing requirements of Senators, Members and parliamentary committees and reduces it in election periods. Accordingly, although net budgeted operating results will be neutral over time, actual operating results for individual financial years will vary depending on the parliamentary demand patterns experienced and the depreciation pattern arising from actual asset use.
