Today I’m reading Liz Doucett’s manuscript for Creating Your Library Brand, and for me it shed some real light on the ongoing debate about whether libraries should become more like community centers. The answer lies in your library’s story:

Branding is one component of marketing strategy. Branding is the process of defining a library’s story into a short, appealing statement that tells the whole story in one sentence and then visually conveying the story via the library’s logo and other branding elements. But what is the “story”? The library’s story is the articulation of the role a library plays or wants to play in its community. To be a powerful story, the library should be talking about a role that no one else can duplicate. The story is meant to inform anyone considering using the library about what makes it special and a place worth visiting. The story can be about the details of the library (great customer service, a large collection, a beautiful building) or it can be about the needs that the library could fill in the lives of its patrons. The story might be that the library is a place where a community connects and comes together. It might be the intellectual center of a small town. It could be seen as the tool that parents could use to give their kids a head-start in life. It could be the center of campus life for a college or a place where a student can feel part of a community at a large university. Any one of these stories could be compelling to people thinking of using the library. They are powerful definitions of what makes the library relevant and important in its community.

It is imperative to remember that as a library develops its story, it should check back with its patrons/potential users to make sure that its story is not just unique but also relevant and meaningful. It is great to say that a library has the largest serials collection in the county, but if potential users don’t care about serials, then that story has no relevance and will not help make the library attractive. A meaningful story will motivate potential patrons to come to a library because they are seeking what the library provides.

A former private-sector marketer turned librarian, Doucett provides straightforward, jargon-free direction and guidelines for libraries that want to communicate their value and relevance to their communities. Look for Creating Your Library Brand in our spring/summer 2008 catalog.

This week I’ve been immersed in reviewing the chapters of a forthcoming contributed volume from ALA’s Government Documents Round Table. Ably edited by Andrea Morrison, Managing Electronic Government Information in Libraries: Issues and Practices fully covers the territory, from collection development to cataloging to reference to preservation and many topics in between.

Yesterday I was particularly pleased by the usefulness of the chapter on integrating government resources into information literacy instruction. Chapter authors Barbara Miller and Barbara J. Mann point out that government information, particularly electronic government information, is perfectly suited “to illustrate principles of information literacy such as determining and differentiating between primary/secondary sources, developing critical thinking skills, determining bias, understanding issues of copyright and intellectual property, evaluating Internet sources, and understanding freeware databases versus restricted (or copyrighted) information.” They follow with concrete examples and suggestions for incorporating government information sources into the framework of information literacy standards, as well as tips for promoting awareness of government resources among nonspecialist staff and the public.

The next installment in the popular PLA Results Series is on its way through the production pipeline! This time experts Jeanne Goodrich and Paula Singer tackle HR in Human Resources for Results: The Right Person for the Right Job. The authors lay the groundwork with a macro view of how the library’s investment in its employees translates into the library’s larger purpose: providing services the library’s customers need and deserve. The following chapters offer a menu of projects to be sampled or consumed entirely, soup to nuts, as your library’s needs warrant. Topics include

• conducting gap analyses
• writing effective job descriptions
• recruiting, testing, screening, and selecting new employees
• developing and implementing a performance management system
• retaining a high-performing workforce

The book is filled with practical strategies for (what else?) getting results, including these Interviewing Dos and Don’ts:

• Prepare. Learn as much as you can about the job; read any materials (such as candidate applications and resumes) you’re given ahead of time.
• Establish rapport with the candidates. Be open and friendly and help them get through their initial nervousness.
• Ask the same questions of each candidate. You want to find out the same sorts of things. Using a structured set of questions and consistent types of follow up questions will insure that you do.
• Listen carefully to what they have to say. Ask follow up questions but fight the urge to talk extensively yourself.
• Watch for nonverbal cues or responses that might signal evasiveness.
• Take notes. If there are more than a few candidates, the interviews can easily run together. You want to be sure your impressions are based on information you’ve gleaned on past performance, not on your superficial impressions.
• Avoid stereotyping or jumping to conclusions. Base your impressions on what you hear and what the candidate can tell you about what she has done in past positions.
• Don’t make snap judgments. Adler believes that more hiring mistakes are made in the first thirty minutes of an interview than at any other time. Why? If our initial impression is favorable, we’ll begin selling the job, magnifying the positives we hear and minimizing any negatives that come up. Conversely, if our initial impression is negative, we dismiss the candidate before we’ve even heard much about his accomplishments in other jobs.
• Be wary of the halo/horn effect. This refers to our being influenced by the last positive or negative thing we heard or, in the case of a current employee, job activity. All information should be taken as a whole, with no one piece carrying a disproportionate weight.
• Avoid contrasting the candidate in front of you with ones you have seen previously. Take in information on each candidate and then make comparisons at the end of the interview day, after you’ve seen and heard them all.
• Avoid telegraphing answers to candidates, verbally or through your own body language. Be friendly and open but don’t coach or lead the interviewee.
• Tell the candidates what will happen next and within what timeframe. If it takes several days to conduct interviews or process results, they need to know.
• Be sure that there is follow up. Candidates deserve the courtesy of knowing where they are in the process. If they are ranked, eliminated, or selected to move to a next step, they need to know as soon as possible.

One challenge I often hear from librarians…particularly those new to management… is discovering things “‘they’ didn’t teach us in library school.” For those who hold leadership positions in the 7,000+ small libraries in the country…where juggling multiple roles is the order of the day…that concern is amplified.

This week, I’ve been working on a manuscript, The Small Library Survival Guide: Creatively Doing More with Limited Resources, by Herb Landau, director of a tiny library in the heavily Amish community of Lancaster, Pa. After working in corporate America for some 30-years, Herb took a “retirement job” as the first full-time, certified director in the library’s 40-year history. Retirement, ha! The first year, when the library faced a 43% cut in state public library aid, battled a proposed 20% cut in county library aid and watched county voters reject a county tax referendum to provide only $24 per family each year to ensure public library survival, he realized he’s have to bring in the best of his corporate experience to keep the library afloat. In this book (look for it in the fall), he will bridge that gap between “the business skills you don’t always get in library school” with the on-the-ground job of daily librarianship. (In 2006, his library, Milanof-Schock Library, the was named the Best Small Library In America by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Library Journal.)

About 50% of his time, says Landau, is devoted to fund-raising. “When people ask what fund-raising tools we have tried, I answer, only half in jest, “everything except pay toilets and slot machines, so far,” he quips. Some of his innovative, if not unorthodox fund-raising tactics: providing a passport application service, working with an outside firm to recycle donated printer cartridges, cell phones and other computer parts for cash, offering an exam proctoring service. May sound like chump change, but the dollars can add up fast.

Of course, a library cannot live on Friends of the Library book sales alone. The book is full of funding ideas (as well as other “they-didn’t-teach-us-that-in-library-school ideas”…from surveying customers to strategic planning to marketing). Below is his advice on developing a fund-raising strategy:

As with all important library activities, fund raising should also have a structured strategic plan (see Chapter 4) to ensure it is done in an efficient and effective manner. As a minimum, you should establish annual fund raising objectives derived from your annual budget projections for needed income. It may prove desirable to develop a long-range fund raising plan and incorporate it into your strategic plan, linking fund raising objectives to the resource requirements and schedules for your various strategic objectives. As with any strategic plan, your fund raising plan should have clearly delineated goals, objectives, strategies and tactics as well as assignments of leadership and work responsibilities. It should present defined schedules, resources needed and expenditure budgets for fund raising tasks. Be prepared to invest both time and money in your library’s fund-raising efforts. If you need to hire paid consultants to advise and guide your fund-raising, then do it. My daddy’s advice that “you gotta spend some money to make some money” is most relevant here. Do not be afraid to consult with people who have fund raising experience and to co-opt them to serve on your volunteer fund-raising committees. I have found that people with both non-profit fund raising and industry marketing experience, particularly in direct sales, can give you much useful advice.

Today, I had to be home to let a repairman into my condo, so I’m working from my “home office.” I love how the march of technology has made this possible. I can connect to the same things remotely that I can while I’m sitting in my little office on Huron and Wabash.

There are definitely things to enjoy about this occasional gig. No commute. I’m wearing sweats and slippers and don’t have a stitch of make-up on. The downside is that my upstairs neighbor is a work-from-home computer consultant. She’s very little…can’t weigh more than 80 pounds…but she has a habit of galloping through her condo, which makes all the china in my cabinet shake. (At work, Booklist’s Bill Ott has his office on the floor right above mine…I never hear a peep from him).

Anyway…maybe she’s galloping for joy at being able to work from home. I sometimes think that would be a great gig. But, by the end of the day, I’m not so sure. I feel out of sorts. Sickly, shut in, lonely…

Ironically, the manuscript I happen to be working on right now is veteran consultant Ulla de Stricker’s: Is Consulting Right for You? A Primer for Information Professionals. She provides a good case for all the consulting opportunities for librarians and others in the knowledge biz. And, she goes through all the plusses and minuses. Yep…one of the big plusses is being able to avoid the commute and wear your bunny slippers to work when not calling on clients. But, she is pretty good about helping the reader think through the downsides too…for instance, the loneliness, the fact that you have to rustle up said clients, and the fact that the income may be unsteady until the business develops.

Ever thought about being a consultant? If so, this is a great book for librarians and others in the information business (who, by the way, have great skills that are well-suited to consulting). Among other things de Stricker discusses in the book (like setting up shop, finding gigs, developing your “professional partnerships” [with accountants, IT people, etc.], negotiating contracts, pricing your services…and much, much more!), she asks readers the fundamental questions they need to ask themselves. Am I cut out for this? Does this sound like you:

When librarian consultants discuss among themselves the key reasons they are successful, they often focus on a set of personal characteristics that enable them to tackle the challenges associated with project work and deliver the results clients want. Key among those characteristics is a rock solid belief in their own abilities and a capacity to avoid becoming depressed or insecure as a result of any untoward project experience.

That ability to roll with the punches is key, as are some other important characteristics. Patience, emotional detachment, comfort working alone, time management, being able to see the forest as well as the trees. There are some skills that are innate, others that can be picked up, she says.

Anyway, this will be a great read for anyone who’s ever thought about being a consultant or, who may be trying to get his or her consulting business off the ground.

As for me? I’m glad I live in a time where working from home, if necessary, is possible. But, I think I’ll be just as glad to catch the Red line to be among my colleagues tomorrow.

Today, I hope to put into production a manuscript by University of Rochester’s Susan Gibbons. The book is about “Net Genners”—the now college-aged contingent who grew up spending their after-school time being shuttled in their parents’ mini-vans to organized sporting events; singing along with Barney, who reassured them how special they were; IMing each other while simultaneously listening to music, doing their homework, and playing videogames.

Of all the discussion swirling around about what the emergence of these digital natives means to the future of librarianship, I think Susan Gibbons pins it down in the most concise, compelling, and practical manner. What makes her perspective especially interesting is that she and her colleague at the University of Rochester, David Lindahl, won a grant to have a cultural anthropologist, Dr. Nancy Fried Foster, study the habits of faculty (mainly to understand how to develop the institutional repository) and then, in a later study, the habits of students. For two years, Foster observed this fascinating species in their natural habitats…skipping through their eating and mating habits (probably for the better)…to find out how they approach their academic work.

As data emerged, Gibbons found she had to toss aside some preconceptions…that students’ Xboxes, IM accounts and IPods were at best, secondary to their academic work, at worst, distractions. Instead, she concluded:

It did not take long before I realized that my preconceptions were completely wrong. iPods, cell phones, wikis, instant messenger, and online games are not ancillary to traditional academic tools, such as books, laptops, and lecture halls. Rather, these technologies had become essential to the students’ academic toolkit. Moreover, if academic libraries wanted to continue to be a vital part of the academic success of undergraduate students, we needed to embrace these technologies as well.”

While reading this manuscript, I was struck by how different these “kids” are today. When I was a college student, my folks would drop me off at the front door to my dorm, slip me $20 or $30 “for emergencies” (money immediately went to the Friday-night beer fund), and drive away. I’d talk to them from the short-corded phone affixed to the wall of my dorm room every Sunday. Nowadays, wireless “family share plans” mean that college kids talk to their parents just about every day. And, if they have a research paper to write, chances are that Mom and Dad will be consulted during the research process. (They call this parental involvement “helicopter parenting”, by the way).

I couldn’t look up cute guys on Facebook, I was lousy at multitasking, and, yes, I knew that a research paper meant a trip to the library. No Google searches of packages from Amazon for me.

This is an interesting read (you’ll be able to read it for yourself in the fall). There’s no handwringing over the eventual demise of the library in this book. Instead, Gibbons provides some cultural background, specifics of how students interact with technology, and, most important some advice on how libraries can get into the game.