Creativity For Library Career Advancement

"Creativity is just connecting things," observed Steve Jobs. In today's diverse, ever-changing job market, creativity is more necessary than ever. In a profession offering a broad range of job opportunities, librarians are surrounded by myriad connections to be made. They are trained to recognize them. This collection of new essays covers a wide spectrum of methods for cultivating creativity. Topics include learning through role-playing games, libraries as publishers, setting up and using makerspaces, developing in-house support for early-career staff, creating travelling exhibits, creative problem solving, and organizing no-cost conferences.

Learn how you can use creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship as powerful forces for positive and productive change benefiting staff and users. Given the pressures of automation, budget issues, and staff development concerns, creative thinking in the library profession is a necessity, not a luxury. For the first time in a single volume, librarians share specific, practical ways in which managers can release creativity in themselves and their staffs, in order to find solutions to new problems, as well as new ways to address old challenges. The contributors to Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship also describe how they used creative thinking to develop a very successful fund raising plan, significantly reduce the risks of developing new services in library networks, take part in effective communication between library educators and practitioners to ensure that library science students are better prepared for the field, and much more.

This book can help you create, encourage, and participate in an environment that is conducive to creativity, helping make change a more natural and organic part of the library's culture.

This book shows academic and public libraries the many benefits of nurturing a culture of creativity, offering hands-on guidance on encouraging cross-disciplinary collaboration, launching active-learning events that highlight collections and services, fostering goodwill and trust-building, and forming partnerships that promote library visibility.

Development of Creative Spaces in Academic Libraries: A Decision Maker's Guide includes innovative ways libraries are engaging students, including the practice of setting aside high-tech spaces for creativity. Five models of library creative spaces are explored in this book, including digital media labs, digital humanities labs, makerspaces, data visualization labs and knowledge markets. The book explores creative spaces currently offered in libraries, with a focus on academic libraries. It gives real-world advice for the process of crafting a new space in the library, including tactics on how to find campus partners, conduct a needs analysis, and answer important questions. Case studies of innovators of library creativity further highlight the successes—and pitfalls—of embarking on the process of developing a new service or space in the library. Shows administrators what other institutions are doing to enable media literacy Helps university library administrators determine their best course of action Provides detailed, unique case studies on up to 10 leading institutions, along with the service models they are providing

By building on existing elements at your library and filling in the gaps with community-driven additions, your library can be a space that cultivates creativity in both its users and staff.

Creative Library Marketing and Publicity: Best Practices shares the success of libraries of various sizes and types—small to large public, academic, and school libraries, systems, and organizations. Each best-practice scenario describes a library’s successful experience with marketing, branding, and promoting a library service or program, providing information about planning, actual promotion techniques, and evaluating the success of the plan or promotion methods. Most importantly, each include tips and best practices for readers. Many of these ideas and techniques are applicable across the board, so they will help you implement similar methods to promote your library services and programs and spark different and unique uses for these techniques. Strategies covered include: Using constituents’ voices in outreach efforts Building a social media presence Crafting step-by-step marketing plans Planning and implementing branding campaigns Creating buzz with promotional videos Using e-mail marketing in outreach Marketing a new library space Marketing on a shoestring budget Drawing on the best practices, experience, and expertise of library personnel from public, academic, and school libraries, this volume brings together a variety of marketing plans and creative methods for promoting libraries and their programs and services to a twenty-first-century audience. All library employees should be able to take away something from these creative, successful efforts and apply tips, techniques, and best practice suggestions to their own library marketing efforts.