Marketing as Conversation: How to Interact with Your Community Through Your Website

What I liked best about this meeting at the Public Library Association Conference in Portland was seeing Gina Millsap with whom I worked at Daniel Boone Regional Library in Columbia, Missouri years ago. The program was good, too!

The Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library is a leader among libraries in innovative adoption of social networking tools to advance its mission. TSCPL has ten people working for "the digital branch," which includes its website and social websites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. The Lester Public Library in Two Rivers, Wisconsin is a small library in town on Lake Michigan north of Milwaukee. All of the library's social networking and web development falls on the library director. The difference in size between the two libraries is vast, but both are creating digital identities and connecting with their communities.

Jeff Dawson is the Director of the Lester Public Library in Two Rivers. (He said there are two other libraries by the same name in other parts of the state.) He said that he had never even had a computer of his own before he became the director about three years ago. Knowing he needed to do something easy to get his library into social networking, he got a camera and an account on the photography website Flickr. He began posting pictures with some library information and then broadened his efforts posting pictures about sites and events in his community. Soon people began to say that he covered the community better than the local newspapers. He then started a blog to serve as the library website; he write posts there but usually posts photos from Flickr that feed automatically onto the blog. He has now also set up Facebook and Twitter accounts; again most of the content comes via Flickr. Dawson said that he takes fifteen minutes each day as he arrives at work to load a new picture on Flickr, which then goes to the other three websites. The result has been that the visibility of the library is up as is its use, and Dawson has become a recognized person in a community that strongly values being native-born.

David Lee King is a well-known figure in the online library community. As Digital Services Manager at the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library, he leads a team that builds an elaborate website, manages the library use of social networking tools, and even produces podcasts and YouTube videos for user education and promotion of the library. Even with a large staff, King repeats that reusing content and feeding it to different websites is important. One of his department's jobs is constant watching for and responding to comments from the community harvested from the library's blogs and all of its social networking sites. King showed examples that resulted in the purchasing of library materials, answering of informational queries, solving service problems, and improving library services.

Gina Millsap, the director of the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library, spoke about how important her library's digital efforts have been. She said that her library has mastered the art of conversation, increasing community involvement and the demand for library services. Though not a primary mission, getting community involvement has led to political strength when the library has been threatened with reduced funding. When asked how a library gets reluctant staff to participate in providing digital services, Millsap said that she wouldn't let staff refuse to use the telephone; digital services are now basic and everybody's duty. "Serving our patrons wherever they might be is not optional."

The slides for the presentation may be found at http://www.slideshare.net/davidleeking.

Thrilling Tales and Selected Shorts: An Adult Story Time for Your Library

Are you ever too old for storytime at the library? David Wright of Seattle Public Library thinks not. When his library moved into its new building in 2004, he found that he had a small theater at his disposal, so he started a storytime series for grown-ups. He told the Public Library Association Conference about reading stories to the older set at his program Thrilling Tales and Selected Shorts: An Adult Story Time for Your Library.

David foresaw that a storytime for adults would go well in his location, a busy city library. Having a noon-time program twice a month would provide an entertaining activity for local workers and tourists, practically a captive audience. He also figured that the popularity of audiobooks could carry over to live events if well presented. He further believed in the importance of story, saying that telling our stories is one of the actions that defines us as human. He knew he had nothing to lose, and he is still publicly reading aloud six years later.

Knowing that not all libraries can draw noon-time audiences, David had other ideas that libraries can try at other times, including the following:

• Short story discussion groups
• Reading aloud while knitting programs
• Short stories and movie adaptations
• Stories that go along with one book/one city programs
• Stories that help celebrate historical anniversaries
• Stories for outreach to seniors, patients, etc.

David discussed his experiences and provided a variety of "take away" advice.

Always use a microphone. You will be heard better, preserve your voice, and be able to range from whispers to raised voices.

Read at least two stories. The first should be really short, 5 to 10 minutes. It gets the audience used to listening before starting the main story.

Promote as entertainment rather than literature or culture. Then choose very entertaining stories, modeling the program on the methods of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Twilight Zone. Start with sure bets, such thrilling stories by Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl, or Patricia Highsmith.

Use different voices for characters. Turn slightly for changing character.

Practice, practice, practice. Practice aloud to learn what are the hardest words and phrases. Mark up a script to help with voices and emphasis.

Keep water handy. Plan pauses.

Have a clock handy. Don't rush.

Plan ahead so that the program can be well marketed and the reader has plenty of time to practice.

I Have These Statistics - Now What: Getting Started on the Path of Collection Analysis by Kathryn King

If I understand her correctly, Kathryn King, the Adult Materials Selector of the Ft. Worth Public Library, deals with collections instead of books in her library. By that, I mean she analyzes collections first and sets goals for purchasing and weeding before contemplating individual books. Those goals are pretty specific, too. Instead of getting rid of a certain number of books in a Dewey area or genre area when weeding, she wants to get a certain number of a certain age range out so that (1) she is left with certain ratios of age to collection and (2) to balance annual relative use (RU = percentage of circulation divided by percentage of collection). Weeding may not be sufficient, so she will then have to add a certain number of new materials to get the age ratios right and balance the relative use of highly used collections. To extend the horticultural metaphor past "weeding," King is a "landscaper" instead of a "gardener."

At the Public Library Association Conference in Portland, King told about her customer-oriented work in the Thursday afternoon session I Have These Statistics - Now What: Getting Started on the Path of Collection Analysis. She began by defining several measures of the collection, all based on statistics drawn from the database of the circulation system. The great detail about very narrow segments was impressive. It all worked toward measuring relative use.

Here is how King sees relative use:

RU = 1 (The collection is meeting the demand.)

RU > 1 (The collection needs expansion.)

RU < 1 (The collection needs weeding.)

King reported that the Texas State Library recommends that 25 percent of a library collection needs to be materials published in the last five years. She thinks that is not good enough overall and particularly bad in specific critical areas, such as health, finance, travel, and decorating, where at least 70 percent should be from the past five years. With these Dewey subject areas, it is the content that is most in need of being current. Even in less critical areas, most of the items should be from the last ten or maybe twenty years. With these areas, the driving concern is style more than content. Libraries want to have books that look contemporary. In other words, nice jackets and color photos instead of old library bindings and 1950s illustrations.

One King statement really challenges the way many of us buy books. She said that to meet demand in high use Dewey areas, buying multiple copies of the best books serves better than buying single copies of many titles. When there are single copies, some readers will take them all, leaving none for the next reader. Multiple copies leaves items for second and third readers. Customers are better satisfied and circulation rises.

Another statement for us to mull over is that it is unfair to apply less stringent weeding criteria to less critical areas. If a selector says that every book in one area had to circulate within the year and in another area let books that sat for two or three years stay, that selector will actually be withdrawing better circulating books and reducing the overall collection relative use.

Ft. Worth puts copyright dates on all spine labels. Readers like knowing the dates and weeding is easier.

King said that weeding needs to be done even in years of reduced funding for purchasing new materials. The relative use needs to be kept in balance. Not weeding now makes more work later. In her opinion, it is better to have no books than bad books.

Collecting these statistics should be relatively easy if library selectors have a good integrated library system. King emphasized that collection analysis should be done to better serve the public and to have hard data when arguing for continuing financial support.

You Say You Want a Revolution

When the Adams County (Colorado) Public Library spun off from the county in 2005, it owned seven crumbling building, had sadly out-of-date collections, had little funding, and foresaw the prospect of closure or partial closure. In 2006, speculating that the library would close if it did not get a tax increase, the library's third referendum attempt passed. The board of trustees hired a new director with the assignment to reinvent the library. As new director, Pam Sandlian Smith said that she knew that the library had one chance to become a vital part of the community. "We had to get it right," she said.

PLA's Thursday morning presentation You Say You Want a Revolution told the inspiring story of a down but not quite dead library reviving. New funds helped but were not the most important element, Smith insisted. New leadership, teamwork, rebranding, and radical institutional change were needed and realized. The library was renamed The Rangeview Library District. New logos were designed. Most importantly the library became a user-centric, experience emphasizing service. In designing a new main library, spaces for people were designed before spaces for materials. Dewey numbers on spine labels were replaced with natural language subject labels, which the library marketed as "Wordthink." Fines were eliminated. Big desks were eliminated. Library programming emphasized interactive programs. The story seems right out of a made-for-television movie, but it really happened, if the five people on stage and the visual evidence is to be believed.

I'm not sure the program really communicated how much work the library revitalization must have been. The presenters told about all of the committees formed with staff, trustees, and community volunteers, which must have involved countless hours. Changing all of the spine labels and related data entry must have taken many months of work. Everyone on the staff had to learn new jobs with new titles, such as "wranglers" and "guides." The presenters went quickly past the topic of work to get to "the fun stuff." They even threw out T-shirts just like between innings at a minor league baseball team.

The marketing firm Richocet Ideas influenced much of the redesign, helping the library design a campaign to appeal to client aspirations, selling experiences. The firm even helped create new imaginative language, such as "flufferovin" (the job of tidying displays to make them more attractive) and "Yellow Geckos" (staff who do something that I did not quite catch) and "Anythink" (the message that anything can be done better at the library). The work seems to have become more fun. The happy staff seems to have infected the clients who now come to the library more frequently.

The underlying message is that disrupting the library's long-lived conventions may enliven a library bold enough to embrace change aimed at pleasing clients. The hardest part may be believing that it can be done. With their backs against the walls, the Rangeview staff embraced the change. Over two dozen of them came to PLA to help spread the word, which is itself impressive.

Readers' Advisory 2.0: The Next Dimension

"Readers advisory is not ready reference." Barry Trott, Portland, Oregon, 2010

I don't know if Barry Trott of the Williamsburg (Va.) Regional Library has said this before, and I don't know if he borrowed it from someone else. He said it almost as an aside part way through his half of Tuesday's presentation Readers' Advisory 2.0: The Next Dimension. Still, it sticks with me. I think it explains the whole need for the service. Readers' advisory is work - worthwhile work - and librarians are only going to be successful if they practice and prepare. He and Jane Jorgenson of the Madison (Wis.) Public Library, both managers of online library RA services, addressed how librarians can adapt the tools of Web 2.0 to provide "proactive and reactive" readers' services. "Proactive and reactive" are Jorgenson's terms for taking readers' services to readers (via reviews, lists, displays) as well as dealing with readers' individual requests for books and media.

The Williamsburg and Madison models have similarities. Both have staff from many departments writing reviews that are posted on WordPress-based blogs. They each gather these articles in advance to assure there is a steady stream of content on their sites. Both have personalized readers' services based on surveying a reader for her interests and producing an individual annotated titles list. The two libraries are also connecting these efforts to their Facebook and Twitter pages.

Barry likes the letter "F" while Jane like "C" to describe the elements of successful library RA blogs.

Barry's list:

• Focus - a review blog should not have extraneous posts
• Frequency - regular so readers will know there will be new content
• Fortitude - strength to keep to the focus and frequency
• Flavor - good writing with personality
• Flexibility - staff cover for each other, ability to review new formats, etc.

Jane's list:

• Content - thoughtful reviews for books and media
• Contributors - numerous reviewers allowed their own voice
• Commitment - reviews published on a recognized schedule
• Comments - listen to and share what readers have to say

Barry explained the Williamsburg Looking for a Good Book reading suggestion service. Individual readers may fill out a four-page questionnaire to identify readings tastes, and staff at his library then generate personalized annotated lists identifying ten suggested titles. The library averages about 100 of these each year, having done about 700 total so far. Various staff members prepare them, taking about one-week on average to complete the process. The library asks the clients for permission to retain the original questionnaires. The clients are urged to provide feedback, and there is a shortened form for a second requested list. The users of the service have been about 85 percent women, averaging about 36 years of age with a range of 8 to 88.

Barry knows this is a lot of work for both the client answering a long form and the library. He believes the process has brought his staff closer and taught them a lot about RA. He warns other libraries to do only as much as they can sustain. He recommends having librarians who write well without biases.

Barry spoke about what makes a good review for a library RA blog, such as Blogging for a Good Book. The reviewer should never gush, spoil the ending, or sound corporate (like a functionary of the library). Reviewers should tell what is appealing about the book, movie, or music while being personal, letting his or her individuality shine through. Jane lets her reviewers write negative reviews but only for bestselling, very popular items. Their primary mission is to promote and not expose faults with items, but a few negative reviews gives them some added credibility.

Jane told how Madison services have developed. First, they subscribed to BookLetters; not content to just let the vendor send out its monthly genre lists, Madison reworks each list and creates many more of its own. Second, the library started the MADReads blog, which is turning four years old in April. Third, Madison started a Book-alikes database to keep track of their annotations and use them in individual lists. Fourth, the library has taken the content to Facebook and Twitter. Fifth, the library is looking to produce podcasts and vodcasts (video podcasts that could be distributed through a YouTube channel).

Sadly, Jessamyn West was unable to present her portion of the program due to an unfortunate strike of lightning disabling the plane that was to fly her out of Vermont on Monday. Barry and Jane tried to address some of the issues that would have been Jessamyn's. Her presentation outline with links can be seen at www.librarian.net/talks/pla10/.

As the program ended, Jane spoke about "The Big Silence" that libraries may encounter after starting their RA blogs. She and Barry have stats and incidental evidence that once well promoted, the reviews are read. Comments are slow coming mostly because the review readers have not read the books or seen the movies yet and have nothing to say. RA blogs may never get many comments. Future research could be done to see if titles reviewed show signs of increased circulation.