PASSIONATE ABOUT SCHOOL LIBRARIES
As Juliet says,
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;”.
Does the same hold true for libraries?
My principal recently asked me what I’d like our school library called and I had the opportunity to rename both my own role and the name of my school library. I had to ask myself if I should I stick with the word ‘library’ or should I look for something else?
Marketing and branding can be such a powerful thing for our libraries. If you want to follow along with this post series as I explore creating a library marketing plan, check out all the posts here.
When I started to investigate creating a library marketing plan for our school library, I drew upon my marketing and branding knowledge from the business sector and started researching the topic. You’ll find some links to great articles, podcasts and further reading in my second post in this series.
I love library marketing and branding and think it can be such a powerful thing for our libraries. If you want to follow along with this post series as I explore creating a library marketing plan, check out all the posts here.
When I started to investigate creating a library marketing plan for our school library, I drew upon my marketing and branding knowledge from the business sector and started researching the topic.
I love library marketing. There are so many facets of this. It’s not just promotions or publicity, though they play a part. But it’s also the bigger picture. It’s about how your users view your library. It’s about how the library team work as a team to market the library in a certain way in everything they do, from creating a flyer to promoting an event to each interaction at the circulation desk. And yes, maybe it makes me weird, but the idea of creating a library marketing plan EXCITES me. Continue reading
It’s ALIA Library and Information Week 2022. Held annually, ALIA LIW has recently changed date. Now celebrated in July, I love the creative themes (and graphic design, which is always AMAZING) for this special week. In previous years, I’ve made a big deal of Library and Information Week in my school libraries. This is a week celebrated by libraries of all categories and sizes, from public libraries to specialist libraries, so it’s nice to join in with this. However, this year, my focus has been on other things, so we haven’t celebrated LIW in the school library.
But, I couldn’t let the opportunity pass to mark the week or to reflect on how apt the theme is for our library this year.
Advocating for your school library can seem like a mammoth task or maybe something you are not sure how to do. And sure, when you have to fight for your position or funding or to even have a school library in your school, it can be overwhelming. But, I’ve found that the very best and most powerful forms of advocacy are the most simple, easy actions that fit into your everyday practice.
Here are a few examples of advocacy actions I’ve done in the past six months.
The Young Entrepreneur: How To Start A Business While You’re Still A Student
– Swish Goswami and Quinn Underwood –
Kogan Page
Published 31 May 2022
♥♥♥♥
The Young Entrepreneur delivers exactly what it promises – an entirely practical guide to starting your own business. This is the perfect overview of entrepreneurial thinking and approaches, with examples drawn from the authors’ own experiences.
The Non-Obvious Guide to Marketing and Branding (Without a Big Budget)
– Rohit Bhargava –
Ideapress Publishing
Published 11 May 2021
♥♥♥♥
I liked that this book is called the non-obvious guide to branding and marketing and that is actually what is delivers. So many books and articles I’ve read on branding and marketing cover the same ground. Helpful and effective, but very similar. This book looks at things from a different angle and included things I hadn’t read about in other branding books. For example, this book not only tells you why you should create customer personas and how to write them, but how to better meet your customers’ needs and use this information to guide your outreach and get customers to actually start marketing and advocating for you. Similarly, instead of just demonstrating what a tagline is or why you need one, it breaks down the steps on how to create one in a way that actually seems achievable, even for me.
Advocacy is a bit of a funny word, I think. Sometimes it can be daunting. Maybe it’s something we know we must do as school librarians, facing budget and staffing cuts and increasingly challenging times, but equally something that we think we might not have time for or might be something that is too hard or too out of our reach to do. Advocacy might conjure up thoughts of national or international campaigns or perhaps having to go and fight for the job you are about to lose or the 80% cut to your school library budget or perhaps the loss of the school library space altogether. And while these things do form part of advocacy, I believe that advocacy can also be far smaller and simpler. It might also be things you are doing each and every week.
Simply put, advocacy is defined as supporting or arguing for something. And that is something we do each and every day.
Have you ever fallen short of a goal you have set for yourself? I know have. Many, many times. Just recently, I set for myself a goal of increasing engagement on our school library social media account. I started using Reels and Stories and posting more often. I used a scheduling tool to post on the days I wasn’t working and to ensure we had a consistent presence. And it worked. We increased our followers over the term by 26 and increased accounts reached by 5745% to over 47,000 accounts and 3229 content interactions.
So where does the failed goal come in? I was determined to continue this over the school holidays. That’s the time the students are most likely to be scrolling on Instagram, right? It makes sense for the Library to be active then, sharing tips on how to access ebooks and promoting holiday reading. I’d even lined up a connection with the local public library so that I could share their holiday programs and collections. But. Instead, I did nothing. Nada. Not a thing. I didn’t post once on our school library account over the two week period.
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