Connecting Librarian

Been thinking a lot lately about the dreaded M word – one that often makes librarians apprehensive and quickly pointing it out as someone else’s job.   I used to believe it myself, but can honestly say that it is no longer true.

Maspalomas, Canary Islands

The M word is marketing.  Libraries have called it many other things, including outreach, community engagement and more.  Why is it dreaded?  I can think of several reasons including that it reminds people of shonky salespeople (who would want that sort of reputation?), because cold calling people is awkward and uncomfortable and because often librarians are introverted.  Not that these are bad things necessarily.  Can you think of other reasons why it affects library staff so negatively?

Anyway, I have been thinking about this for a while. I have been try to look at my job from an object point of view , looking at why and how I am doing things, not just what. Then this morning I read a blog post Outreach is (un)Dead at In the library with the leadpipe.  It expressed some of what I had been thinking about and is worth a read.

I am responsible for my library’s website and in the whole my daily work includes updating blogs, slideshows and other elements of virtual services.  We have several blogs and the ones I post to either review titles in our collection and/or share news about the library and its services or things happening in our community. The slideshows do the same. So I spend a proportion of my work day directly marketing.

It goes further than that though. In my interactions with customers, I find myself marketing.  Do you know about the library website?  I love that author, have you tried this one?  (on noting what they are borrowing) Did you know that we have this event coming?

And it goes further again.  I said on Facebook (via Twitter) the other day, that I was taking my kids to the library.  A Facebook friend replied that they didn’t think that was too exciting.  The conversation went back and forth for a bit and by the end of it, she was asking me for the details of our storytimes and which would be best for her child.

Marketing is becoming second nature now and its great that it is. We have so much great stuff at the library, collections, services and events and we should be talking them up every chance we get, whether its in person, in print, display or online.  It never ceases to amaze me that even well established library members are not always aware of the breadth of things that we offer – so we should continually be raising their awareness as well as reaching out to others not yet making use of their local library.

Why that is needed, is not necessarily our fault alone.  We can do more to promote  our libraries to our users and to potential users – but we are restricted by limited space, time and budgets, so we can’t do as much as could be done. On the otherhand, our users can have tunnel vision when they visit the library and not see beyond what they are focused on.

So I guess the next thing is for us to get serious about marketing as part of every library staff member’s job description and find ways within our work and our libraries, to promote everything we do and offer.  Its awesome stuff, its free and its relevant.  And it doesn’t have to be an uncomfortable process, it can be as simple as having a friendly conversation.

Marketing for me is no longer the M word – its a key part of my work and I am looking forward to doing a better job of  it.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Marketing and Libraries – check out the M-Word blog, Marketing at the Library Success wiki and of course your local library associations and organisations.

Through all my years as a librarian and the different roles I have had, I have always worked with reference collections, usually pretty closely.  Until recently, where my role has been working with the virtual more than print of any type.

But as part of my appraisal this year, one of my goals was to weed the reference collection at our biggest branch.  This collection has filled 17 bays of 5 shelves each.

It has been quite a few years since it has been weeded well, beyond replacing superseded editions.  And it shows.  I went in expecting to weed maybe up to 40% of the collection.  So far, I have weeded just over half of the collection and the proportion of the collection that had been weeded out is over 60%.

It may have been much higher, but that included our motor manual collection – which coincidentally is the best used part of reference and which, therefore,  will not be hitting the lending shelves or withdrawals anytime soon. And there are other classic titles too, which are much too precious for their unique content, that likewise will not make that journey.

Fair price on the scales by purplbutrfly

The weeding hasn’t been hard to do either.  I’m a chucker rather than a hoarder, but I think that even a hoarder would be hard pressed to keep more than 50% of the collection.  The amount of dust accumulated on each title shows how little the majority of the collection is used in these days of online information domination.

Fortunately, a lot of what I have weeded has gone straight to our lending collection.  It is good quality information, if just a bit dated now, but I’m sure that most of it will do well there, much better than it has done in reference in recent times.

Which brings me back to the hybrid idea.  Print reference is not dead in my library, not yet, but it is no longer the force that it was.  Now it seems that print reference is a backstop to our online resources and the internet, whereas it was always the other way around.  Now its where you go, when its too hard or really to obscure to find something online. And even that’s changing.

For a long time, when talking collection development, we talked about the hybrid library – finding the balance between print and electronic resources. When it comes to reference type material, the scales are now definitely tipped in favour of the electronic.

Its funny though. Even though I work on the library’s virtual spaces and spend a lot of my time online and love it, it has been surprising in a way to see the stalwart of information services – the reference collection, whittled away so, in importance as well as in collection size.  I have long appreciated going to the reference shelves and being virtually guaranteed of finding a book that would help with that immediate user need. I think that I still have some of the romance of the book attached to the librarian in me.

So as our print reference collections dwindle, alongside their corresponding budgets, I say goodbye to the hybrid library.  Online is now dominant in the world of reference, both in the eyes of staff and users.  This is not a bad thing, as there are things online that people seek which we would likely never had in a print reference resource.  But as they go, I cant help but feel a tiny bit wistful for what was.

Maybe because it was the bastion of librarian’s assistance to our users – where we could take them to discover the world of information – something that is not so easy or so common in the online world? Maybe its as I said before that there is romance in books and reference books are  a category all of their own. Maybe its because reference books were always something special, a unique type of book not appropriate for any other location.  Maybe its because each reference book was a treasure just waiting to be discovered.

I’m not sure why it is, I just know that the end of this era is coming fast and its one I will miss.

How about you?