Crowdsource Your Library Engage Your Community

This book illustrates crowdsourcing techniques that will help you to raise money and collect community knowledge so your library can be its most impactful. This informative guide teaches you how to strengthen your library's collections and services and develop your relationships with patrons by crowdsourcing ideas, support, and skills from your community. Citing success stories from libraries across the country, it also specifies tactics that will help you to serve specific demographic groups, including children, teens, and adults. You'll learn how to more exactly meet your patrons' needs by welcoming suggestions for improvements to your library. To raise money for special projects, you'll learn how to garner the necessary support; the author explains what types of funding campaigns are particularly suited to crowdsourcing and offers concrete steps for executing crowdfunding library initiatives. Moreover, you'll learn how to act as your community's documentarian by using crowdsourcing to gather and preserve community knowledge such as local history, providing your community with a reservoir of information from which it can draw for years to come.

This book illustrates crowdsourcing techniques that will help you to raise money and collect community knowledge so your library can be its most impactful. This informative guide teaches you how to strengthen your library's collections and services and develop your relationships with patrons by crowdsourcing ideas, support, and skills from your community. Citing success stories from libraries across the country, it also specifies tactics that will help you to serve specific demographic groups, including children, teens, and adults. You'll learn how to more exactly meet your patrons' needs by welcoming suggestions for improvements to your library. To raise money for special projects, you'll learn how to garner the necessary support; the author explains what types of funding campaigns are particularly suited to crowdsourcing and offers concrete steps for executing crowdfunding library initiatives. Moreover, you'll learn how to act as your community's documentarian by using crowdsourcing to gather and preserve community knowledge such as local history, providing your community with a reservoir of information from which it can draw for years to come.

Think Big: A Resource Manual for Library Programs That Attract Large Teen Audiences is a how-to manual for librarians who want to attract large groups of teens to their libraries with meaningful, memorable events. Large programs may seem to be impossible to attempt until the project is broken down into the separate parts needed. Think Big begins with those separate parts necessary to create a large event, starting with the logistics of time and place, the budget and how to find funding, making a timeline to make everything fall into place, communication among all of the people involved, marketing to the teen audience, troubleshooting with thorough preparation, and the importance of evaluations for reporting and for future planning. Part 2 is a collection of best practices. Seventeen successful, large programs are included, contributed by librarians who have dared to think big and made it work. Included are the book and author programs in school and public libraries. There are also creative programs about poetry and dance, STEM activities, pop culture, and school and work. Every section has two to four programs. Each program explains how the program began and evolved to the event it is today. A timeline, how the program was financed, who assisted to make every step successful, how the program was publicized, and how evaluations were collected and written are provided in detail to empower a librarian to tackle their first-time big program.

In this book, author Stephanie Katz, founding editor of the award-winning literary journal 805 Lit + Art, shares practical tools and advice for starting successful creative publishing projects. Publishing benefits libraries by providing high-quality content to patrons, showcasing local writers and faculty, and creating buzz for the library. These endeavors can be launched at any type and size of library, often for little to no cost. Libraries Publish teaches libraries how to publish literary magazines, book review blogs, local anthologies, picture books, library professional journals, and even novels. You'll learn how to run a writing contest or writer-in-residence program, form community partnerships with other literary organizations, find funding, navigate legal considerations, market your publication, and more. Each chapter contains detailed information on how to start your project, including comprehensive checklists, recommendations for free software, and legal considerations. Social media strategies as well as tips for facilitating student or teen-run projects are also covered. If your library wants to start a publishing project, this book will be your go-to resource!

This Toolkit provides you with everything you need to successfully market any library. As libraries continue to fight for their survival amid growing expectations, competition from online sources and wavering public perceptions, effective marketing is increasingly becoming a critical tool to ensure the continued support of users, stakeholders and society as a whole. This unique practical guide offers expert coverage of every element of library marketing and branding for all sectors including archives and academic, public and special libraries, providing innovative and easy-to-implement techniques and ideas. The book is packed with case studies highlighting best practice and offering expert advice from thought-leaders including David Lee King and Alison Circle (US), Terry Kendrick and Rosemary Stamp (UK), Alison Wallbutton (New Zealand) and Rebecca Jones (Canada), plus institutions at the cutting-edge of library marketing including the British Library, New York Public Library, the National Archive, Cambridge University, JISC, the National Library of Singapore and the State Library of New South Wales. The key topics covered in the text are: • Seven key concepts for marketing libraries • Strategic marketing • The library brand • Marketing and the library building • An introduction to marketing online • Marketing with social media • Marketing with new technologies • Marketing and people • Internal marketing • Library advocacy as marketing • Marketing Special Collections and archives. Readership: The book is supplemented by a companion website and is essential reading for anyone involved in promoting their library or information service, whether at an academic, public or special library or in archives or records management. It’s also a useful guide for LIS students internationally who need to understand the practice of library marketing.

Crowdsourcing, or asking the general public to help contribute to shared goals, is increasingly popular in memory institutions as a tool for digitising or computing vast amounts of data. This book brings together for the first time the collected wisdom of international leaders in the theory and practice of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage. It features eight accessible case studies of groundbreaking projects from leading cultural heritage and academic institutions, and four thought-provoking essays that reflect on the wider implications of this engagement for participants and on the institutions themselves. This book will be essential reading for information and cultural management professionals, students and researchers in universities, corporate, public or academic libraries, museums and archives.

Whether we need to make better financial choices, find the love of our life, or transform our career, crowdsourcing is the key to making quicker, wiser, more objective decisions. But few of us even come close to tapping the full potential of our online personal networks. Lior Zoref offers proven guidelines for applying what he calls "mind sharing" in new ways. For instance, he shows how a mother's Facebook update saved the life of a four-year-old boy, and how a manager used LinkedIn to create a year's worth of market research in less than a day. Zoref's clients are using his techniques to innovate and problem-solve in record time. Now he reveals how crowdsourcing has the ability to supercharge our thinking and upgrade every aspect of our lives.

Foreword by Tracie D. Hall Community engagement isn’t simply an important component of a successful library—it’s the foundation upon which every service, offering, and initiative rests. Working collaboratively with community members—be they library customers, residents, faculty, students or partner organizations— ensures that the library works, period. This important resource from ALA’s Public Programs Office (PPO) provides targeted guidance on how libraries can effectively engage with the public to address a range of issues for the betterment of their community, whether it is a city, neighborhood, campus, or something else. Featuring contributions by leaders active in library-led community engagement, it’s designed to be equally useful as a teaching text for LIS students and a go-to handbook for current programming, adult services, and outreach library staff. Balancing practical tools with case studies and stories from field, this collection explores such key topics as why libraries belong in the community engagement realm; getting the support of board and staff; how to understand your community; the ethics and challenges of engaging often unreached segments of the community; identifying and building engaged partnerships; collections and community engagement; engaged programming; and outcome measurement.