Shortly after I began working at Anacortes Public Library (APL), I realized that there weren’t any events for all ages, and I decided to try having a genre night event. The first year since a new Star Wars film was coming out in theaters, we did a Science Fiction night, and had about 300 people of all ages show up in varying costumes, to see a local theatre troupe read and perform homage pieces to Sci-Fi, check out the collection and decorations (as well as an art show), and generally just have fun. After the community raved about it, I asked if we could do a similar program around the theme of Harry Potter. I chose to do this for a few reasons, not just that Harry Potter is fun and universally loved. First, it connected our staff as a team, and they reacted enthusiastically to seeing community members jump to volunteer, and get excited about a library event. I wrote up press releases, did a photo shoot beforehand, and had the local paper attend the event not only to cover it, but also had a reporter dress up as Rita Skeeter and host the photo booth.
For this event, we had more than 700 attendees, and broke every library program record, and having a genre night is now an annual event. The library had done Harry Potter events and even had special events, but I think the outreach, marketing, and community involvement were what made this event resonate so much with our city. In my outreach and marketing plan, which I wrote up formally for a class submission, I highlighted target groups to work with (including local city officials, teachers, and students), as well as ways to advertise and connect with local businesses and tie in library services and relevance with something people loved.
This is a key example of how combining traditional storytelling and events with connecting with community and planning to share and market can have lasting results for a library. In this case, the community wants the event every year, and references it as when they began to think of the library as theirs, rather than just a place with books, which I think is a large part of how librarians can advocate for their communities. People in our community were asking for family events, all ages fun, and affordable activities, and the library answered with an event that let them be nostalgic about reading, and also connect to do something together.
Harry Potter Night at the Library Marketing and Outreach PlanPartnership with Anacortes School District and Skagit Reads
After writing the grant, accepting it, and writing all the partnership and area library funding agreements, my job had just begun. Now that I had booked an astronaut who was going to come to our library program, I needed a way to promote the event. Looking at the resources we had on staff, I decided we’d do a pre-interview in a podcast format, to put on our website the week of the event. After Wendy Lawrence agreed, I spent hours listening to NPR interviews, other astronaut interviews, and reading everything I could find publicly available on Lawrence. I focused on asking questions related our program, as well as questions about her career that I’d compiled after asking many of our library patrons what they’d want to ask her. I wrote out the questions, which are linked here, and we did the interview in two separate takes, as recorded. We had one shot, so I had to be able to read my questions and not stumble, because we had only one hour with her. This is work I’m proud of because I got outside my comfort zone to promote the library. This project took preparation and the ability to improvise, which I think are both instrumental in library advocacy.
Interview with Astronaut Wendy Lawrence for NASA@ My Library Promotion and Podcast:
In this proposal, I researched and presented a new live-streaming program plan to meet the emerging needs of the Anacortes Public Library community, to align with their strategic plan, using the information I’d researched on emerging technologies and public programs from the National Impact of Library Public Programs Assessment (NILPPA). To meet the increasing programming demands of the community, this proposal suggests utilizing emerging technologies that could expand programs and engage users in new ways that would help the library to reach more potential users. In this proposal, I presented how the existing programs could be enhanced by adding live-streaming technologies, as well as how staff could learn the skills necessary, how minimal the budgetary impact could be, and how the program could be evaluated and grow if users adapted to it.
I first focused on how the existing programs had risen in popularity, and how this new proposal would address recently identified strategic goals to expand the audience. Combining local and national evidence for how technology could help APL expand services, improve evaluation, and thus increase the relevance of the overall program were my main goals for this proposal. In my rationale for why this was a practical technological solution to building the programming services of Anacortes Public Library, I included NILPPA survey information to articulate how utilizing this technology could aid APL in reaching their more global librarianship goals of reaching a more diverse audience, and bringing more diverse programs to our community members.
Finding new ways that users can attend and participate in programs, and promoting local businesses and figures, is one way more people can be reached. A survey performed by NILPPA found that librarians most of all hoped that “increased understanding of the diversity of library types and purposes will lead to greater effectiveness of programming and community engagement” (Fraser et al., 2014, p. 1). By using new participatory technologies, the Anacortes Public Library can try to make programming more effective, and more engaging to its community.
Combining relevancy to the current population, national trends, an action plan that includes options for staff training and budgetary steps, as well as expand the reach of current programs to include more in-person interactions, whether live or in later comments, and expand the possibility for using other participatory technologies like social media make this proposal the kind of work I hope to do a lot of in my career. Connecting the relevant objectives and outcomes from a library’s mission statement to what emerging technologies can do is a new task for information professionals, that can help librarians continue to be conduits to knowledge and connectors in communities as they always have been. Finding relevant ways to bring global content to local audiences, and showcase local programs in the digital world can continue to connect people with services and opportunities they can access from their local library. That’s the magic of technology for libraries, as long as the technology is accessed for relevance, and utilized with global librarianship in mind, technology can keep libraries more present and engaged in their communities than they’ve ever been before.
Emerging Technology Proposal for Live-Streaming ProgramsIn this presentation, I worked with a group of students in our Young Adult Services class to investigate and share participatory culture research, and how it can be applied in libraries, specifically for teens. Our group wrote the paper that I’ve included a link to as well, because it includes all the references to information I cite in the presentation. I recorded and uploaded the video, and was responsible for a section of the research, and specifically the examples of other libraries, including international locations, that are utilizing participatory learning in their libraries. This presentation represents my philosophy on engaging students in learning as lifetime skill, and supports giving them the space to do that, facilitating learning, but not just doing rote work. This is especially important in library settings, where people choose to be. One of the main ways this supports my philosophy of instructional programs is that it highlights the importance of giving youth, and all learners, the chance to be creating and doing, instead of just passively talked to as happens in a traditional classroom. Focussing on peer to peer sharing, especially for teens who are creating digital content, or presenting work at programs together as they do for library events when they write skits or perform written work, is a prime example of how connected learning in a participatory culture is fundamental to keeping the third space of the public library relevant as a learning environment.
Participatory Culture Presentation