Advocacy

Whether lobbying legislators for funding libraries or a foundation for new shelving, public library leaders, communications staff, and even frontline workers need to be efficient and nimble when articulating their impacts to outside stakeholders. Crucially, they need to approach the question from the vantage of how the library’s outcomes align with that particular stakeholder’s mission.

The State Library of Ohio has launched Libraries by the Numbers (LBTN), a web-based data visualization tool that enables users to create custom infographics about individual library systems using data drawn from their Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Public Library Surveys.

Sterling Heights Public Library, MI, has been offering BrainHQ, an online suite of gamified brain training exercises available to libraries through Demco’s partnership with Posit Science, as a component of a yearlong community initiative called “Exercise Your Brain!”

Combining marketing savvy and hometown ties, Medina County’s Tina Sabol turned a library levy campaign into a communitywide advocacy win/

In the second quarter of 2017, Facebook grew to more than two billion monthly active users, including 236 million in the United States and Canada—two-thirds of the combined population of those countries. According to a recent report in Forbes, Twitter’s growth has been slowing somewhat, but the number of average monthly active users on the platform grew five percent year-over-year to 328 million worldwide in Q217. According to a recent report in TechCrunch, Instagram has doubled its user base during the past two years, reaching 700 million monthly active users this spring. Social media is where people are online, so libraries need to be there, too.

Library staff are the folks who love to talk about books. The more people we reach and can inspire, the happier we are. We also love to talk about libraries and their place in our society and share ideas about how to make libraries a better place for our users.

Facebook Live is video streamed over Facebook and archived there afterwards. All libraries need to get started is a smartphone/tablet and the Facebook app, or a webcam attached to a computer running the Google Chrome browser.

Matthew Ismail loves to challenge assumptions, and as Director of Collection Development at Central Michigan University for the last five years, with stints at libraries in United Arab Emirates and Egypt before that, he’s seen plenty of them. “We librarians assume that patrons will come to us,” says Ismail, who holds four Master’s degrees, one being an MLS from Kent State. “In the 1980s, they had to come to us, there was no internet. Today, many people are able to complete their careers without using the library at all. That would have been more difficult in the 1980s.”