CIL 2012 Day 3 - No More Excuses

This was an inspiring presentation largely made by Janie Hermann, Public Programming Librarian at Princeton Public Library, with some bookend presentation bits by Nancy Dowd of EBSCO. Janie related a series of successes that the Princeton Public Library has had, largely by being open-minded and listening to their customers.

The first story she told was of a Python programming group that had tweeted about wanting to meet in a space in the library but being bummed that it would cost $25 a month to do so. Janie saw the tweet and contacted the club offering them six months of meetings in their small meeting room. She figured this might pay off since the demographic in a Python programming club was likely to be quite different from their regular demographic. After 5 months the programming club was very happy with the arrangement and wanted to know if it could continue. Janie offered them the large meeting room in exchange for teaching beginner programming classes at the library. The club enthusiastically agreed and it has grown and the classes that it teaches are very popular. A win-win situation.

Likewise she told a story of a self-proclaimed quirky individual who came in and asked if the library would be willing to host events and promote a Pi day celebration to mark Einstein's birthday (Einstein's birthday being March 14, or 3.14 and Einstein having been a famous resident of Princeton). Several other agencies in the community had been asked by this person but had declined as they thought the idea was strange. The library embraced it and through promotion, the selling of Einstein dolls and programs it has become a big success, drawing in tourists and getting the attention of the New York Times.

The lessons of these stories is to listen to your community and then meet them where they are.

Other interesting things that Princeton has done have been:

• host speed networking events for local business people
• open the library at 5:00 A.M. so residents could communally watch the royal wedding
• post all of their flyers on a page on Flickr
• host a “talk-like-a-pirate” day to promote Mango, which had just released a “pirate” module and through humor brought awareness to the real features of Mango

Janie mentioned some other best practices as well. A neighboring, much larger library just posts its events to Facebook and has about 300 followers on Facebook. Princeton interacts with their users in an active fashion on Facebook, doing much more than promoting their own events, and has 2200 followers.

Other suggestions were:

• Connect and be authentic but still maintain your brand.
• Know your audience interact with them in a variety of locations.
• Keep it local
• Keep it Quirky .. and relevant (Pi day reading list)
• Do #FF and RT local agencies on Twitter

After Janie's presentation, Nancy Dowd demonstrated a new Novelist related product called LibraryAware. It looks like a promising tool for easily developing, printing, and sending consistently designed and professional looking promotional materials. It looks like something that would definitely be worth a look once it's live.