Sticky 'Brary

In my efforts to do outreach to the local business community, it has become apparent that a significant number of the obstacles to overcome lie within the library itself. Here is a running list, in no particular order, of the things you might want to have hammered out before embarking on an outreach campaign: Solidify with your manager the process for attending local business functions. What paperwork is needed? If there is a cost, how do you get reimbursed? Who gets the paperwork? What forms do you need to file? If it will be an ongoing, recurring event does that change the process? What is the easiest, least time consuming process for all involved? If the reference desk schedule needs to change, how far in advance do you need to alert your manager and/or coworkers? Who do you report your successes to? When? How? If you are out in the community, that is the perfect time to sign people up for library cards as they don't have to carve time out of their day to come into a ...

In the world of marketing public libraries, or any library for that matter, here is the question that I keep coming back to: What is more efficient, social media/2.0 stuff or face to face interactions? My bias is towards f2f, for the following reasons. One of the biggest -- THE biggest? -- assets that libraries have over the general online world is giving people the ability to pick up a phone (or, horrors, their feet) and contact a real, live human being who gives a damn about their question. Being out in the community in person helps hammer this home. I view a lot of the library 2.0 mania as an online extension of the same model that got us into the bind we are in: staying comfortably within the four walls of our buildings and not having those messy interactions with real, live people. But wait, you say, isn't the point of 2.0 interactions that we are interacting with those we don't normally reach? Yes, but I come back to the original question: is the online or the persona...

I really should round up some research on this (or the great library blog reading community could contribute ideas, if you have them) but my gut tells me that the business community trusts the library. Not just to do research and return reasonable results to their questions, but also in sharing information with us. Case in point: Just yesterday I was doing some research for a local banker who wanted to know what the competition was offering in terms of "analysis" or "analyzed" business banking accounts. She only wanted the information from four other institutions so I told her I would call around on her behalf. When I called up the competing banks and told them that I was doing research for a patron and needed to know the fee structure for their analyzed accounts, they were more than willing to help out. I think that if I had called and said something like "Hi. I'm calling from a competitor of yours and I need you to take some time out of your day to d...

As I've been wrestling with the problem of getting the local business community thinking of and turning to their public library, the most basic advice to share with myself is the following: fall forward. Falling hurts. It hurts the ego. It hurts the knees. It hurts the ribs. It just plain hurts. But here's the deal: it hurts far less to fall forward than it does to fall backwards. No matter how awkward it feels to attend business networking events (think high school prom, sans date), just being there is enough to move things in the right direction. Remember this: people think libraries are cool, even though they have no idea what it is we actually do.  Armed with this supercool persona that strangers are immediately willing to grant you, put yourself into acting mode when you are doing outreach. You don't have to be yourself. So go say "Howdy. What brings you here?" and eventually you will introduce yourself to the right person and things will open up from...

So here's the deal. Among a number of other hats that I wear, I am the Business Reference Librarian at the Spokane Public Library . Confession: I have never owned a business, run a business, been interested in owning or running or working at a for-profit business. How's that for a resume booster? I've been in the library world, in one capacity or another, since 1996. My passion is spreading the gospel of the public library, which in turn depends on a healthy business community to provide my paycheck. So it turns out that my greedy self-interest coupled with my passion and appreciation for the public library can (at least partially) overcome my previous lack of interest in the business world. As I've been doing this Business Reference gig since 2006, I've been collecting "notes to self" about missteps, gaffs, and the occasional success of making the library "sticky" (in the Made to Stick sense of the word). This bloggy thing is meant more as...