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.