PLA Blog

As of the ALA-APA meeting this morning, these are the total attendence numbers:

ALA 2006 New Orleans - Member registration:

• Advance = 9,047
• On-site = 2,765
• Total = 11,812

As a comparison, these are the numbers from Chicago and Orlando:

ALA 2005 Chicago - Member registration:

• Advance = 13,407
• On-site = 5,591
• Total = 18,998

ALA 2004 Orlando - Member registration:

• Advance = 10,201
• On-site = 3,137
• Total = 13,338

Overall, the difference between 2004 (where the Orlando location was widely criticized by members) and New Orleans is just over 1,500 attendees. The final numbers will be posted later this week.

Karen Hyman, Executive Director of the South Jersey Regional Library Cooperative, always has something interesting to say, and the humor in her delivery is just downright entertaining. After her fabulous presentation at the Smartest Card symposium at Midwinter, her presentation on telling a story to market, defend, or just talk about your library was not only a logical next step, but also fit in with the marketing theme of the preconference.

Her basic message was so simple, yet so brilliant. Tell stories because they’re memorable, they tell something about your organization, and they work. Don’t give them a laundry list of facts. They don’t care about numbers, you lost them at the first statistic. What trustee boards, town budget meeting attendees, potential funders, and even just patrons want to know why the library matters, and why to care.

Karen has a four-step process for stories:

- Creating the story.
- Framing the story.
- Creating opportunities to tell.
- Telling it. [And, telling it well.]

But how does one create a story?

- Decide what do you want to say
- Find examples for your story
- “Make the story about them,” and why the story matters to them
- “Make something happen”

When you deliver your story, Karen says you should portray the feeling that “It’s Christmas, and we’re all drinking Budweiser, and we all love each other.” It’s also the feeling that your listeners should have. Focus on the human interest part of what you’re getting across, and only sprinkle the story, your “elevator pitch”, with numbers as necessary. Be brief, speak to your audience to let them know why they should care, thank them for the opportunity, and don’t forget to tell them what you came for and ask for it (more money, more staff, the opportunity to make the community shine again, etc.).

An example of word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing that tells a story
At Hartford Public Library, everyone on staff is an advocate. Everyone on staff chooses a group or groups, or is assigned to a group or groups, and they talk the talk about their library, and they love it. But remember, your staff needs to love talking about the library to do something like this, you can’t just tell people they have to love being an advocate for the library in the groups they frequent. [So, really, make your library a place your staff will love to talk about!]

Using the local landscape to tell a story
If you look at the Ocean County Library web site, you can see that it tells a story. The Customer Quotes & Fun section, which is currently being rebuilt, normally lists a story from a patron about how much they love the library, and how the library has helped them. This library is able to collect this information, and understanding the community, share the information with the community, through simple stories.

Getting started now
- Add survey pop-ups at the end of in-house automated services, like Internet use time-outs, or when a patron closes a browser. It’s amazing the kind of content you’ll get.

- Have “Can we quote you?” sheets at every desk, and if someone says something you can use as a story, ask them if they or you can jot it down.

- At Reading Public Library, where I work, we have “Moments of Truth”, where we jot down an experience we had with a patron where we felt like it really made a difference. The quotes are added to staff newsletters, and often requested by city hall as ammunition and support material in favor of the library.

- Follow many of the tips given by Peggy and Linda on WOM marketing.

Gathering stories is an ongoing process, and it helps your library prepare to counter the bad experience stories.

What do you do with the people who aren’t comfortable talking in front of people? The story might be a good way to start to acclimate them to talking about the library, since good stories are the kinds people want to tell over and over again to everyone.

Don’t be that person who stands before a group and reads from a single-spaced sheet of paper full of boring numbers that no one cares about. Don’t wait until you need to defend your library to have a clear message. Have something ready to tell the world why you rock, and why you need what you need when you need it, because you’re worth it. Besides, everyone loves a good story.

My conference experience ended with a half-finished cab ride in which a limo opened its door as our cab pulled up to one of my cab mate’s hotel. No one was hurt (at least the fistfight between the drivers had not yet broken out when I decided to head north on Michigan). I decided that I’d been given the first and only opportunity to see what Taste of Chicago was all about. For less than 10 bucks, I had pad thai, barbecue, turtle cheesecake and some cooling lemon ice. The third-rate reggae band was free, as was the resultant migraine.

While most folks are back home by Wednesday, Councilors are obliged to stay until the last Council session ends after noon Wednesday. Exec board has even more work to do after the last Counilor has grabbed a cab. Council III can be pretty calm and finish early, or like today, have a full agenda and some dramatic discussion. Here are some selected actions that came out of Council meetings, many the result of difficult and passionate discussion and compromise (the final text of these resolutions is not yet available):

• Resolution in Suport of Immigrants Rights to Free Public Library Access
• Resolution on Disinformation, Media Manipulation & the Destruction of Public Information
• Resolution on the Connection between the Iraq War and Libraries
• Resolution on Threats to Library Materials Related to Sex, Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation

The last resolution gave newer members the opportunity to hear some institutional history from veteran councilors who were with ALA during the civil rights era. Some chapter Councilors were concerned that this resolution would damage already tenuous relationships between some library communities and their local and state legislators. These Councilors said that they were working on this issue on a local level and would not be able to support the resolution. ALA veteran Mary Biblo recalled that the same argument was used in the sixties when several state chapters were segregated and ALA required them to integrate. Another Councilor added that “a threat anywhere is a threat everywhere” and said that it was important that this resolution come from ALA. Noted intellectual freedom advocate June Pinnell Stephens said that this resolution was rooted in ALA’s “bedrock principles,” and that “if you think they’ll make hay of this resolution, just think of the response if we failed to support it.” It was an informed, passionate discussion that reminded me why I choose to be involved in governance.

The highpoint, for me, came in Council II when Deborah Jacobs, Chair of the Public and Culture Programs Committee (and City Librarian, Seattle Public Library), created a teachable moment when she reported to Council the first-year activities of the PCP. Many Councilors were unaware of the work or, even, the existence of the committee, or of the impact that public programs can have on a library community. I was happy to be able to support Deb’s remarks with my own comments as an experienced programming librarian. Council and the CPC came through with $2500 in donations for the Cultural Communities Fund.

I came into this conference not sure of my ongoing commitment to Council, but left feeling sure that I will seek another term.

Smartest Card: Talking the Talk
Originally uploaded by AndreaMercado.

Peggy Barber and Linda Wallace, founders of the Library Communication Strategies, Inc. consulting firm, gave an excellent presentation on the beauty and brilliance of word-of-marketing for libraries.

When Peggy asked the crowd a few questions to start (there were about 66 people in attendence):

How many people in the room have done media interviews for their library?
10 people or so.

How many people in the room have made presentations to groups?
Way more, about 25 or so.

How many people in the room talk to other people in the library?
*Everyone*.

The point? Word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing is for everyone, because we all talk to people. And Peggy said, “If we get our acts together, we will truly rock the library world as we know it”. Call it advocacy, marketing, whatever, this is a “team sport, and we just can’t be passive anymore”. We compete with other agencies who want library money, Tivo, Xboxes, you name it. So we all need to talk the talk as a unified force, the entire staff, all the time, even off the job.

When asked how many people had training in marketing in library school, only 2 raised their hands, and that’s “two more than usual”. So really, the Smartest Card program really is innovative and encouraging, but schools really need to step up and teach marketing of services, too.

WOM is actually becoming more important and influential in our society. While the benefits of this type of marketing may be obvious, especially since it’s been so successful for the likes of Amazon, The Body Shop, and Ebay (they started out with WOM at the beginning, with paid advertising coming much later), Peggy and Linda outlined the main upsides:

• WE CAN AFFORD IT. Who can’t pay to talk to people to chat about libraries in line at the grocery store? At some point, someone actually recommended that ALA “spend the entire ALA endowment on ads” to get libraries back in the forefront and thought of as just as essential as a hospital, or a fire station, or the police. Libraries aren’t just a civil good, libraries are a civil necessity.
• WOM marketing is active, not passive, not reactive. You ask people to spread your word, don’t just tell them about it and walk away. As libraries, we’re not getting paid to do it, we’re not trying to hustle a commission, and, well, if we do it well enough, other people will catch on, too. Using WOM marketing, we can work together virally to combat the bain of the spread of the “bad experience story” with the awesomeness of sharing a good experience story.
• WOM is viral. Tell your patrons that the most wonderful thing they could do, other than offering their time and their money, is to offer their recommendation. “If you like this service, tell your friends!” should be something every library worker says to every patron who has a wonderful comment to share with the library, and every handout and evaluation form for classes should include a note that says, “Did you enjoy this class? Tell your friends!”

WOM Marketing must haves from the experts, Peggy and Linda:

1. A good product… GREAT customer service!
2. A clear and memorable message
3. A prepared and committed sales force
4. People willing to testify
5. A plan

Also remember that you should always have an “elevator pitch”, a 3-minute schpiel about your library that you could present in the time you might be in an elevator. Then, be prepared to give you pitch no matter where you are, whether or not you’re on the clock.

Linda had an excellent story about being tagged by TSA agents in the airport. While her things were being examined quite carefully, she had opportunity to ask one of the agents, “Do you have a library card?” And the agent was very proud and excited to pull out his library card, and to have the other agents show her their library cards, too. Just an example of how a library card, how library services, can come up in everyday conversation, helping WOM marketing work for libraries.

WOM marketing has worked for some of the most successful businesses of recent commercial history. Use WOM marketin at your library, and show Microsoft that their slogan “Your Success, Our Passion” should have been stolen from librarians.

George Needham, the neat freak
Originally uploaded by AndreaMercado.

George Needham talked to the Smartest Card crowd on Friday, Jun 24 about how environmental scanning – examining and evaluating your current culture and methods, and those of the competition – is key to forming a marketing plan. George also reported extensively on OCLC the report titled “2003 OCLC Environmental Scan: Pattern Recognition“, an environmental scan of the library landscape. Google is part of the competition and currently may be giving us a run for our money, but environmental scan can help us learn from them, to figure out what we should be doing to compete, and even win.

Here of the OCLC environmental scan of libraries that he shared:

Social
Librarians have been doing what campus builders do with sidewalks. But information consumers have shown us that there’s a huge difference between how we do things on the Internet, and how consumers do them. Instead of paving the paths that have been tread by Internet pedestrians, we need to start making those sidewalks for users. As it is now, by the time libraries and librarians have those sidewalks down, users made new paths already, and learned how to pave them themselves.

Information has followed Moore’s Law, and the way that consumers handle information has followed Moore’s Law. Consumers don’t care about our rules. The serendipity of walking into library and browsing shelves has been replaced by RSS feeds and blogs, because these info delivery systems give the same serendipity.

Economic
Redefinition of the public good has impacted libraries in the wallet. Tax changes like those in CA a few years back and now in OH, can change what kind of money a library can get, and it can happen anywhere, so libraries need to be prepared for turbulence in even in the smoothest economic atmosphere.

Technology
Flickr. del.icio.us. Furl. The key to these online services is that they allow people to bring their own structure to information (see Social above where “consumers don’t care about our rules”). Libraries need to be able to roll with these punches. Especially because the distance between “I can’t believe you have this” and “I can’t believe you don’t have this” has gotten to be much shorter.

There’s also a crazy dynamic between digital rights management (DRM) issues, “socking down user rights to data and applications, even when they really don’t exist”, in parallel to the open source movement, where the rights are as open as humanly possible.

Research and Learning
The “proliferation of e-learning” is changing how libraries can contribute to life-long learning. Now, community “continuing education” is an even bigger part of the role of a public library, or at least it should be. Some are even looking to libraries to become the DSpaces of the community, not only depositories of local history content, but aggregations of locally created content.

Libraries
In performing this portion of the scan, OCLC talked to librarians, users, trustees, to get a sense of what was going on in libraries today.

Whoah, nelly, the staffing issue, and the “graying of the profession”. Average age of library staff at the Library of Congress is 58, and so many of them have such institutional memory value, they can’t be replaced. Non-librarians are being hired to perform functions that are non-traditional to libraries library, especially technology.

The library is becoming “The Third Place” that was the buzz phrase of the conference this year. Not home, not work, it’s the place “to reinvent yourself”, an “intellectual center, community center”. Public libraries are ahead of academic libraries in this respect; think of how so many acadmic libraries are creating “the information commons”, or redesigning their libraries to create the same effect.

The definitions of the collection are changing, and how we fit into the change in relation to those collections. And collaboration is becoming strategy instead of just cool a thing to do.

So the big questions become:

How do we fit in the self-serve world?
As librarians, our job is not to present “old things in new and more frustrating ways” using technology, it’s an opportunity to improve upon the old way, to reinvent with technology. Self service is not taking the librarian out the loop, it’s giving customer control, instead of telling them how to do it in a way that doesn’t make sense to them. George recommended that “The Toll of the New Machine”, a Fast Company article by Charles Fishman, be required reading for every library worker, especially to drive home the concept that automation is really about changing roles, not eliminating them.

Disaggregation- what do we do now if our job is to aggregate?
There are fewer intermediaries between information and the user of that information with the rise of blogs and RSS feeds — including librarians. We need to help people understand, on their terms, how to use this information and these tools as they find them, not dictate what to use and how to use it. Libraries can really step up into the role of teaching how to judge authority and usefulness in a more found-information world. The idea is to not make our patrons jump through hoops to find what they need, and once they find it, not make them jump through hoops to get it.

Why is collaboration so important?
Collaboration is an intagible asset. Even companies that were once rivals are now working together in development projects. That’s how insanely prolific collaboration has become. And librarians are finally learning that collaboration works.

Patrons are really becoming natural collaborators, since so much of the technology interaction today is really about how people are *socializing*. Email, blogs, communities, wikis, RSS feeds, IM. Tivo is watcher’s advisory. I actually know someone who told me, “It took my Tivo only 2 days to figure out I was gay,” as a crack about how well his Tivo knows what kinds of stuff he likes to watch. As librarians, we need to do it, too, for our patrons, and internally for ourselves, in order to learn how to do it.

Besides, it’s just so much easier to get everything done, and to find everything, if it’s all connected.

Wanna do your own scan?
In order to do an environmental scan, you need to know your community, be willing to stick your neck out and ask the tough questions, and get with the changing landscape program. Basic steps from his presentation include:

“- Develop a list of the key influences

Identify your leading power players

Develop a list of questions to ask them

Ask them

Compare the answers and connect the dots

Share the results and adjust as needed”

There are books, articles, and sites out there that can help you develop an environmental scan for your library landscape, and examples of environmental scans out there to look at (like the OCLC report). These can help you understand your library and your patrons better, and in turn help you successfully market your services to your community.

After the YALSA Annual Meeting and President’s Program on Monday, I celebrated happy hour with librarians from NY and NJ. We decided to have a quick dinner, but upmteen blocks and an hour later, the next thing I knew, David Sedaris was going on stage and I was downtown eating wontons and orange peel shrimp. I hope someone posts some details, I really wanted to hear what he had to say. But, we had a good time, and it was actually helpful and informative - I’ve learned that sometimes the connections you make at ALA are as valuable as the content of the programs you attend.

One librarian left to go to the Printz awards, two stayed to have dessert, and remaining three of us caught a cab to the University of Illinois at Chicago Student Center near the UIC/Halsted stop. A local young man who I contacted through the Chicago Dance Dance Revolution Meetup Group on was kind enough to join us and demonstrate his fancy footwork (I can hear my mother screeching now - you met with a strange man you found on the Internet?!). He was a sweet and harmless 22-year-old security risk consultant who works with computers and loves to dance, and he brought along his new friend of three days that he met through LiveJournal. I promised him swag from the graphic novel pavilion for taking a chance and hanging out with crazy librarians. The arcade/bowling alley got busier as the night grew later and we didn’t get to play as much as we wanted to, but it was a lot of fun. Getting home was a bit of a challenge, since I am directionally challenged.

One nice thing about having a roommate (besides saving some money and not having to eat dinner alone if you don’t want to) is that if they go to different programs, you get to hear about them and swap information. So I filled her in on the two programs I attended, and she told me about the Art Institute of Chicago Museum, the Ray Bradbury videoconference, and the Printz awards (and the birthday party thrown for a friend by a publisher).

She told me that Bradbury was very adamant about space exploration, and he talked about the things that he wrote about in his novels that had come to pass, and they things he was surprised about (, going to the moon) and the things he wasn’t (the Internet). The man who hosted (his biographer) was excellent. And the Printz award speeches were really good.

We stayed up way too late talking, especially since her flight left at 7 and she was planning to check out at 4:30! I slept in, packed, and made one last round of the exhibit halls on Tuesday morning before attending a YALSA board meeting to follow up on my request for an annual selected list of video games for teenagers. I found out that the technology committee is investigating this possibility. Yay!

I had taken the subway from Midway to Harrison on Thursday, and hadn’t anticipated so many stairs with my three bags in 90-degree heat. And, even though I mailed a box home, I knew I have about 60 pounds of baggage. I decided to take a cab to the airport to catch my return flight. I was lucky enough to meet up in the 8th Street lobby with three publisher reps who had a Portsmouth NH office and were not only sharing a cab to Midway, but were on the same flight to Manchester. They very generously not only paid for the cab (which the three of us in the back seat dozed off in), but bought a round of adult beverages at the airport, and I have three new friends I can call on for review copies of outstanding history titles.

Our flight was delayed due to thunderstorms on the east coast, but one bumpy flight, one hour-long drive, and one load of laundry later, I was sleeping in my own bed again, treasuring the sound of ocean waves. Chicago is nice, but the Atlantic beats out the sound of the El hands down any day.

Wow!:

“Approximately 27,800 attendees and exhibitors attended the 2005 American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference in Chicago, June 23 to 29. This compares with 19,575 total attendees at the 2004 ALA Conference in Orlando.”

This session included presentations by five librarians who work in libraries that serve multi-lingual and multi-cultural populations.

Barbara Clubb of Ottawa Public Library started off the program by speaking about how OPL is required by the government to serve both French and English speaking populations. OPL offers bilingual reference and information services, programming, children’s services, speakers and authors, book clubs, website and even a bilingual ILS. The challenges this library faces include the scarcity of bilingual staff, insufficient training funds, additional costs for buying resources in both languages, duplication of materials and a language rivalry.

Helen Ladron de Guevara Cox from Universidad de Guadalahara then spoke about offering services to indigenous people in Jalisco, Mexico. There are 62 languages spoken in Mexico and 5 intercultural universities. The library in Jalisco is creating collections in indigenous languages, providing computer training and offering literacy programs.

Next Barbara Ford of the Mortenson Center for International Library Programs spoke about the sister library program (an ALA initiative, and on ALA’s website) and hosting international librarians. The sister library program encourages US libraries to form relationships with libraries in other countries to exchange information, improve access to published information in both countries, raise awareness of issues facing libraries in other countries, and offer opportunities to learn more about a country represented by a group in your local community. Hosting international librarians gives an opportunity for international colleagues to observe first hand the day-to-day operations of libraries in the US and to share their stories about libraries in their countries.

Mike Ragen of Illinois State Library spoke of librarians using the census bureau to find information on the community they are serving. He also mentioned grants that his office had provided to local libraries to create cross-cultural programs such as a cultural exchange center, a spanish language video, and holding a family reading night for hispanics where books were read in both English and Spanish.

Finally, Raymond Santiago from Miami-Dade Public Library spoke about the community his library system serves. In the MDPL community 50% of the people were born outside of the US. There are currently 43 branches and collections in 30 different languages. Mr. Santiago spoke to members of these different populations and found that they all want the same thing out of the library; a safe place where a kid could ride a bike there and read a book. MDPL has instituted an international storytelling festival that is in its fifth year and has held librarian exchange programs with librarians in Ireland and Ghana. In his presentation he stated that we shouldn’t make diversity programming different from the other library operations, we should make it part of our normal functions.

My comments: The bottom line is that librarians need to know the communities they are serving. They must constantly evaluate their programs, holdings and circulation statistics as well as other indicators to determine if the needs of their patrons are being met. The best way to know what the community wants is to get out and ask them!

David Orenstein’s presentation, in his own words, was a “little schizophrenic.” Schizophrenic or not, he had some excellent information to share that he’s garnered over several years of management experience.

His talk started with an overview of salary advocacy and communicating the need for fair compensation in libraries. He led a multi-year fight to increase wages for the Montgomery College in Maryland. The advocacy resulted in an 8-10% increase in salaries for Librarians, LTAs and Circulation Supervisors.

David shared a few inspirational, practical communication strategies that he learned from the advocacy process. Some to note:

~ Be a visionary, and communicate your message in a focused and concise manner.
~ Have a sense of humor! Smile when someone is yelling at you.
~ Don’t be mean or mean spirited.
~ Give credit to others.
~ Listen sympathetically and respond with empathy when employees approach you.
~ Remain calm at all times!

As a fairly new supervisor, I also took his suggestion to heart to discuss solutions with employees. If someone brings you a problem, ask the person to think of ways to make it better, then have the person write the solutions down. Too often we have the urge to immediately jump in and fix problems, but that action disables the employee from creatively thinking through the problem and accepting responsibility for a solution.

David also gave good advice when he said that “CW” - or conventional wisdom - needs to be challenged. And when you challenge it, don’t give up on what you know to be the right solution to advocacy or other issues that are important to the growth of libraries.

(David’s talk was sponsored by ALA APA, the Allied Professional Association.)

Wow - after laughing hysterically with David Sedaris and an enormous crowd yesterday, it’s a bit of a wake-up call to be back at work, sorting through e- and print mail. Sedaris read a couple of his works (including a new one regarding a salon visit between a baboon and a cat; he’s writing fables that probably will not end up in your children’s section) and then told us briefly about his experiences with libraries.

A unique experience during his childhood at the Raleigh Public Library led him to believe that he wasn’t alone in his homosexuality. It wasn’t the books that taught him, but well, a certain visual one night. He commented that life has taken him around to New York, Paris and London. Each city offered up their own versions of public libraries for him, although he seemed to have great affection for Raleigh PL and the orange-covered biographies that he spent hours with as a child.

Sedaris also said that he champions a book (usually relatively unknown) on each book tour. Find his recommendations on his site, under Recommended Reading List. He’s right on with Sarah Vowell’s Take the Cannoli, a hilarious look at a family that is almost as twisted as the Sedaris clan.

I had to leave five minutes early to catch the train, but heard the rest of the comments over the loudspeaker outside of the Grand Ballroom. You know it’s pretty funny when you’re laughing so hard while walking away that the carpet nearly trips you up.