Source: Video and Libraries Make The Perfect Marketing Marriage
Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge Pre-Registration
April 28, 2017
We know that reading during the summer helps stop the “summer slide.” Summer is coming, and it’s time for schools to sign up for the Summer Reading Challenge, a fun (and free) way to help motivate kids to read during the summer months. This year, we libraries and community partners can register for the Challenge! They can create “classrooms,” register kids, monitor reading progress, and access free summer reading resources and booklists in both English and Spanish. Go to Scholastic.com/summer to learn more and pre-register!
The Million-Dollar Reason You Need to Market Your Library’s Collection
January 3, 2017$250,000 vs. $8 million. That’s the spread between the amount my library spends on programming and the amount they spend on collections. I bet if you checked your library, you’d find a …
Source: The Million-Dollar Reason You Need to Market Your Library’s Collection
Librarians share their predictions for education trends in 2017
January 2, 2017
Fighting Fake News – How libraries can lead the way on media literacy
January 2, 2017
From American Libraries:
Given the care that librarians bring to this task, the recent explosion in unverified, unsourced, and sometimes completely untrue news has been discouraging, to say the least. According to the Pew Research Center, a majority of US adults are getting their news in real time from their social media feeds.
Read more…..https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2016/12/27/fighting-fake-news/
Seven Seriously Super Ways to Target Teens at Your Library
January 2, 2017
This is the third and final part of our three-blog series on marketing to teenagers. Before you read this post, be sure to read this one and this one. Okay, here are seven more ideas for targeting …
Source: Seven Seriously Super Ways to Target Teens at Your Library
What will libraries do with all that extra space? Fiction E-books outsell print hardcovers
July 19, 2012 
Full year 2011 sales mark the critical mass for the sales shift away from fiction print editions to the E-book format.
Adult fiction ebooks outsold hardcovers in 2011-survey
“Net sales of e-books jumped to 15 percent of the market in 2011 from 6 percent in 2010, according to a report by the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group. The groups compiled data provided by nearly 2,000 publishers. Total overall U.S. book market sales declined 2.5 percent to $27.2 billion in 2011 from $27.9 billion in 2010, the report said. While ebooks increased in strength, bringing in more than $2 billion in 2011, the majority of publishers’ revenue still came from print books, with $11.1 billion in 2011.”
While only holding 15% of the total book market, the market share growth of E-books is quite breathtaking. In a year that saw overall book sales fall by 2.5% over the previous year, E-books market share more than doubled. This raises some critical questions for all libraries in response to this dramatic shift:
- Did your library shift enough in by doubling your E-book holdings and decreasing your print purchases? Or are you falling behind the customer demand curve?
- What will be your strategy to monitor the effective weeding of print materials as the usage continues to swing to digital formats?
- What will be your shelving and floor space strategy as your print holdings decrease in size? What will you do to effectively use this new found extra space?
- Did your library spend the last few years with a renovation/expansion project on hold due to the troubled economy? Are those old plans even valid anymore?
- Are your library’s customer demand patterns for E-books the same demand patterns as they were for print hardcovers. Did you know one of the hottest demand E-book category is the “romance” genre? Do you know that an increasing number of elementary grade students have their own E-book device?
- How are you delivering, informing and marketing this collection shift for your customers?
- Are you making Kindles, Nooks and other E-book readers available to your customers. Are you offering training and support to your customers who already have their own devices?
- How does your customer access your E-book collection? Is it easy, intuitive and customer friendly?
- Does your E-book website portal allow for and promote the: tagging, rating and reviewing that happens in the online retail world? Compare your site to Amazon and see the difference.
- How will you handle the likely customer complaints as your non E-book customers come to recognize the smaller collection size of print?
- Are you and your staff trained and ready to positively handle these challenges? Are you ready to promote and support these changes? This is real and unstoppable.
I believe this is the beginning of a tremendously positive opportunity to reinvent your library to make it even more relevant, useful and an even more important component of your community’s quality of life. This is a new opportunity to reach out to and connect with both new and existing users of your library who may choose to access and use your services in a new 24/7, 100% digital way. Lets face it, most of us have changed our retail shopping behavior because of great internet retailers. Our expectations about what shopping is have changed. Libraries need to rapidly adjust to these changes. What happens to your funding if you don’t keep up with this change?
Are you up to the challenge?
New Library Technologies Dispense With Librarians – WSJ.com
October 26, 2010
The article below highlights possible new ideas to the challenges facing public libraries: how do you improve or extend services when you are faced with continuing budget shortfalls?
Clearly – technology will have to play a role. Netflix and Redbox has changed the delivery of videos to the home. Blockbuster has again filed for bankruptcy and will probably completely disappear. Big box pharmacies (Walgreens and CVS) have added 24-hr. drive – throughs for prescription pick ups.
Isn’t it time for libraries to aggressively explore ways to use new delivery options for providing service for it’s customers?
I have no real fear that most libraries will go away. Strong libraries will continue to provide social and content connections for their communities. Having said that – libraries that are slow to innovate and find new ways to provide additional convenience and services will be in jeopardy.
New Library Technologies Dispense With Librarians
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304354104575568592236241242.html
Text By CONOR DOUGHERTY
HUGO, Minn.—In this suburb of St. Paul, the new library branch has no librarians, no card catalog and no comfortable chairs in which to curl up and read.
Matt McLoone for The Wall Street Journal
A library worker shows how to check out books from a digitally locked cubby, in Hugo, Minn. Audio
Listen: Conor Dougherty reports on the library of tomorrow and what’s behind the shift.
Instead, the Library Express is a stack of metal lockers outside city hall. When patrons want a book or DVD, they order it online and pick it up from a digitally locked, glove-compartment- sized cubby a few days later. It’s a library as conceived by the Amazon.com generation.
Faced with layoffs and budget cuts, or simply looking for ways to expand their reach, libraries around the country are replacing traditional, full-service institutions with devices and approaches that may be redefining what it means to have a library.
Later this year Mesa, Ariz., plans to open a new “express” library in a strip-mall, open three days a week, with outdoor kiosks to dispense books and DVDs at all hours of the day. Palm Harbor, Fla., meanwhile, has offset the impact of reduced hours by installing glass-front vending machines that dispense DVDs and popular books.
The wave of innovation is aided by companies that have created new machines designed to help libraries save on labor. For instance, Evanced Solutions, an Indianapolis company that makes library software, this month is starting test trials of a new vending machine it plans to start selling early next year.
“It’s real, and the book lockers are great,” said Audra Caplan, president of the Public Library Association. “Many of us are having to reduce hours as government budgets get cut, and this enables people to get to us after hours.”
“The basis of the vending machine is to reduce the library to a public-book locker,” Mr. Lund said in an interview. “Our real mission is public education and public education can’t be done from a vending machine. It takes educators, it takes people, it takes interaction.”
Matt McLoone for The Wall Street Journal
A skeptic of the approach, James Lund, of the Red Wing, Minn. public library: ‘We are not a public-book locker.’
Public libraries are an American creation. The first was introduced by Benjamin Franklin, who created a co-operative library funded by people who used it. The first tax-supported library was founded in Peterborough, N.H., in 1833, according to Larry Nix, a retired librarian and library historian. Today there are about 16,700 public library buildings in the country.
Robo-libraries are still a relatively rare sight. Public Information Kiosk Inc., a company in Germantown, Md. that sells kiosks and vending machines to libraries, has had 25 orders for a book-and-DVD-dispensing machine that the company introduced last year. Fred Goodman, the company’s chief executive, estimated that, overall, there are no more than a few dozen vending machines now in operation. Still, he expects to sell at least twice as many units in 2011.
Hugo is a town of 13,700 people on the northern fringes of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area that has seen its population double in the last decade. But surrounding Washington County is struggling to build the infrastructure to support the newcomers: Over the past year, the county’s nine-branch library system has cut the equivalent of two full-time workers to trim costs.
And yet, the system is popular: Visits last year rose 10% compared to 2007.
The combination of greater demand and leaner resources is visible in the wait list for some popular books. The system has 32 copies of “Freedom,” the new Jonathan Franzen novel set in nearby St. Paul, but 321 people on the waiting list—a 10 to 1 ratio. In flusher times, the wait-list ratio was usually closer to 5 to 1 for popular titles.
The 20 lockers of Library Express won’t solve that problem, but they have made the library more convenient. The county is adding 20 more lockers next month.
Melody Baker, 47, recently used the lockers to check out the best seller “Eat, Pray, Love,”—”I had to see what the fuss was about,” she said.
The library’s main branch is five miles from her house, but Ms. Baker, who is a personal care attendant for an autistic child, says it’s hard to get there during business hours when the library is open. “It’s difficult for me to get up there,” she said of the library’s main branch. “This makes it much easier to get library material.”
via New Library Technologies Dispense With Librarians – WSJ.com.
Libraries – power, joy and passion.
January 23, 2010
I unabashedly love libraries…all kinds of libraries! Big libraries, small libraries, old libraries, new libraries and public libraries as well as school libraries.
In several conversations over the past few weeks about libraries, I realized that most people spoke from quite differing viewpoints. There were positions for or against different formats, different customer service ideals, different expectations concerning funding sources, overdue fines, bestsellers, computer usage….you name it. Nearly anything that could be viewed differently…was viewed differently. I left the conversations with a nagging uncertainty. How could there be so many different ways to think about the role of libraries?
I realized that I understood why I loved libraries. I know why I am a passionate believer in the power and joy that libraries can bring to people’s lives. But maybe, many other people had a library experience that was quite different than mine. Those personal life experiences about libraries give then their own unique understanding, perspective and values.
My love of libraries has been influenced by a number of experiences during my life. As an early elementary student – the county bookmobile stopped in our neighborhood, on our street. With no nearby library and no 2nd family vehicle, the rolling library brought far away places and people right to me. The arrival of the big, noisy, smelly, black bus, brought yells of excitement and a mad dash home to get our library cards. Stepping inside and seeing all those books and getting to take two home to read and then return again for more adventures a week later was pure magic. Would it be a Hardy Boys mystery and maybe a book about some wild animal or outdoor adventure? During the summer, those new books were sure to mean a few late nights with the flashlight under the covers.
The bookmobile was followed by our school library. A K-8 private school – with a small, lovingly created collection. Compared to the bookmobile, the options seemed unlimited. For the first time, I saw encyclopedias and dictionaries and amazing nonfiction to do homework assignments with. The big, real world was there in those pages.
High school brought an even larger collection. Remember a time when reference was the dominant part of high school collections? No internet, no google – just print reference. Anything you needed to know were in those pages. Granted – it took hours and sometimes days, but it was in there. Then came a college library in the 70’s that seemed like a warehouse filled with the world’s knowledge. Those old, musty books, the quiet spaces, the decades old single carrels tucked away – seemingly locked away from the rest of the world. Endless days spent exploring, thinking and writing in the world of science, literature, philosophy and more. Group projects meant, index cards, stacks of books, quiet debate and mountains of yellow legal pads of hand scratched notes – the words, numbers and scribbles that occasionally evolved into stories, or projects to be proud of.
As a twenty something trying to make it on my own – working, having fun, learning about life – I moved 4-5 times chasing career opportunities. Each new city or town had a library that offered advice and information as I tried to learn and become a better manager and professional as well as just getting acclimated in a new community. In my 30’s, marriage and family brought the joy of the bedtime story. There is nothing better than a new stack of picture books from the library and having an infant or toddler on your lap turning the pages and loving the moment.
As a professional traveling and working with both school and public libraries, I continue to see all the magic in those rooms and buildings filled with information, computers, librarians and customers and students – all in search of sharing and or receiving the power and joy that libraries offer. I am especially encouraged to see how many libraries, school and public, are moving to further enhance their sense of community and personal interaction. It is no longer just about the content – increasingly it is about the people connections. As the world gets “flatter” and we can interact with people and places from around the globe in an instant, our libraries offer unique opportunities for learning, sharing and engagement in our local and expanded communities. I understand we have many problems: funding, staffing, changing technologies, leadership challenges and increasing competition. But all of those problems have solutions.
Maybe it’s time we stop and take the time to ask questions and really listen to each other. We all have a library story to tell. It is within these life experiences that our passion for libraries resides. Maybe it’s time we ask: staff, customers, local government leaders, school educators and especially our kids to explain why – “Libraries are important to me because…?” From these stories come our passion for library advocay. Let’s talk…. and listen.
Maybe it is within these shared stories and understanding that we will find our common ground, the new ideas and the courage to solve our many challenges. Passion always triumphs over fear.
It’s Time to Reboot – Libraries
January 9, 2010
Maybe – It’s Reboot Time.
It’s a new year, a time to take stock, decide about the good things and troubling things we face. For some personal reasons I had taken some time off from this blog and airing my views and ideas. Part of my reboot process is to get my thoughts back out into the library public. Many of you know, I have regularly expressed my concerns about the general state of both public and school libraries for these past few years. Is there enough money, leadership or general support for libraries? The answer is emphatically NO. That is both the current state of affairs as well as the likely short and medium term future. Acknowledging that – it is time to move forward.
Breaking away from the gloom and doom of funding, staff cuts, lack of leadership and support requires another reboot for libraries – a mental reboot. Rebooting usually requires an action – in this case – it is just requires a new and different perspective. Let’s think about:
This thought comes from the recent publication 10 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2010 by Trendwatching. Check out “Massmingling” or “Tracking & Allerting”. They publish a number of trend reports throughout the year as they identify and report on changing trends and ideas. You can subscribe to their free email listing.
They have a sister publication called Springwise. Here they list the Top 10 Business Ideas for 2010. Think about the “Sampling” or “Connecting Consumers” ideas. You can also subscribe to their free resources.
With both a personal and professional reboot in progress, I am confident we can all work to make 2010 the start of new and exciting ideas, plans and actions for ourselves and our libraries.
The FISH Bits 
