Sticky 'Brary

Good grief, has it really been since November? Latest "Eureka!" moment: I'm part of a sales leads group through Greater Spokane Inc. and I've made myself the personal librarian for the ~25-30 folks who are in the group. They love it. They love having a personal face to put on the library and the longer I'm in the group the better sense they have of just how much we have to offer. But the real beauty of participating in the leads group is that when people from the group refer others to me, they are usually sending them my way because they know that I can help this particular individual with their particular problem. The end result is that those being referred to me (after not being in a library for a number of years) come to me with softball questions that I can crush out of the ballpark. It makes a good first impression and makes it likely that they will come back with other questions when they arise. So the nugget to remember here is this: get a group of fol...

In addition to learning that I need to give audiences time to sign up for a library card at the end of presentations, I've also learned that I should ask the group to "share the library love." When I find myself in front of a group of people (especially volunteer-based organizations like Kiwanis, Rotary, etc.), I've found it productive to make myself available to present to other organizations. Folks who volunteer are often involved in more than one organization and through this simple networking mechanism I've got presentations lined up and on the calendar for the next several months to come. Slowly, slowly, slowly I feel like I'm getting this figured out...

So it looks like the uptick in database usage is keeping on track. Compared with the usage before this bookmark campaign, the numbers for October put us at a 343% increase over August. Not too shabby... Maybe it is time to start thinking about a whole series of bookmarks for our forty-some other databases, no?

I don't know yet if it is just a random fluctuation in the numbers of users, but after slipping the bookmarks for our DemographicsNow database into books on marketing and such (see this post for the original thought), the usage for this month is up 314%. That may be a statistical anomaly but we'll see if it keeps up in the coming month...

Cross-marketing. We all have business books on our shelves. People check them out and we know by the subject headings/titles/content of the books what they are interested in. Generally speaking. At the same time, we have databases with powerful business applications sitting idly by. I'm in the final stages of having our printer whip up some card stock bookmarks flogging the online resources. I will then slip them into books that deal with similar topics. Ideally, I'd like to have the bookmarks included with the book at checkout but the logistics of doing such a thing are a bit daunting. So for now I'll just put them into the recently returned titles (and with any luck, those titles will be going back out again sometime soon). I'll report back and let you know if this gives us a bump in our database stats. Any other thoughts about increasing the use of subject specific databases?

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...

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...