Tag: marketing

November 2015 Library Displays

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So it’s February, but here are the displays I had up in November.

I love highlighting Native American Heritage Month. This year, I focused on items that relate to California and CA’s Central Valley.

Native American Heritage Month

Although I am Mexican-American, Día de los Muertos is not something my family does, mostly because my mom’s side is not Catholic. I really enjoy how much interest develops around the display. Here’s the online display, which I especially like. I re-used last year’s Día de los Muertos sign. One of the evening librarians made the tissue paper flowers during Hispanic Heritage Month, so I re-used a few.

Dia de los Muertos

For Veterans Day, the library media bookstore technician (she is now full-time–the first full-time staff position our little library has ever had!) re-used a banner we had last year for people to honor those who have served in the military. It’s blue butcher paper with white stars attached. People are encouraged to write in a veteran’s name with markers i leave on the windowsill. We put the banner in the hallway outside the library. The technician also put together the display we had inside the library. She also advertised the city’s second annual Veterans Day parade.

Veterans Day

I had one Major Idea display about criminal justice (you can read more about this display series in my August 2015 Library Displays post). I stopped doing this series in November because the space I was using is where I moved our children’s and young adult section. Our history section is out of control, and it was getting way too full, so I moved things around to create room before tackling the 900s this semester.

Criminal Justice

Los Banos Info Flyer (for Faculty)

Just the Highlights

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Veronica Arellano Douglas's avatarLibrarian Design Share

Library informational handouts and brochures–the kind we give away at orientations, fairs, and workshops–can easily suffer from the classic librarian pitfall: TOO MUCH INFORMATION. Striking the right balance between needed information and visual interest is a challenge. Lindsay Davis, librarian at the Los Banos Campus Library at Merced College has created informational flyers for students and faculty that touch on all the library “highlights,” those crucial services and bits of information that will make the most impact with library users.

Los Banos Info Flyer (for Students) Flyer for Students

Here’s Lindsay discussing her design:

This is the beginning of my third academic year as the Los Banos Campus Librarian of Merced College, a community college located in California’s Central Valley. When I give an instructional session, I usually give out a handout that covers basic library information printed in black and white on muted yellow card stock (we only have a few color options through duplication…

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Committee Work: Blogs and Bibliographies

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Faculty members do a lot of committee work for their colleges.  Over the summer, I served on a hiring committee for three positions. This year, I will be once again serving on the Student Success and Support Program Advisory Committee, Institutional Review Board, Student of the Month, and faculty union as a representative for my campus.  My newest committee is serving as the Learning Resource Center’s Academic Senate representative. I also serve on various short-term assignments throughout the year. The faculty lead usually asks me about short-term committees rather than long-term ones because she knows that when I am at a meeting it means I am away from the research help desk, and I don’t have back-up.

However, it is also important for me to serve on committees for professional library associations. I am once again serving of the Association for College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL’s) Community and Junior College Libraries Section’s (CJCLS’) Membership and Communications committee. This year, I will be contributing to the new CJCLS blog! I will be responsible for maintaining a bibliography of scholarship written in the last five years by community and junior college librarians. A call just went out on the CJCLS listserv and on the Community and Junior College Librarians Facebook group. I can’t wait to start receiving citations!

I am also serving as secretary of ACRL’s Instruction Section’s (IS’) Instruction for Diverse Populations committee. We’re responsible for the Library Instruction for Diverse Populations Bibliography.  I will be revising, maintaining, and adding scholarship to the Native American Students and Nontraditional Students sections. I am very excited about this work since I am one of the only community college librarians on this committee. It has also been a long time since I have done this kind of literature review work, so I am thankful to get my feet wet again with an established project.

I am continuing my involvement with ACRL’s Library Marketing and Outreach interest group. I tried to get something going here in the Central Valley last year, but for one reason or another, it didn’t take. I need to give it some more thought as far as trying to establish something here, but it may just be that I join the Northern California team. I get so much inspiration from LMO’s Facebook group. The support and energy there has been great. They even inspired me to submit my DIY work to LibrarianDesignShare.org, and I have always been shy about these kinds of things. (I’ll have more news on this front in another post…)

I promise I am not overdoing it, but I also will be contributing to the Two Year Talk blog.

This is going to be an eventful year! I’m excited to stretch my wings a little more.

Startup Communications

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I just really love the honesty in Meredith Farkas’ latest column in American Libraries. In talking about pitching an idea that didn’t take and then one that was a good fit, she reminds shiny new librarians (that means ME!): “The problem wasn’t [XYZ]; it was trying to solve problems that didn’t exist” (Farkas, 2015).

I have always been an ideas person. and I get really excited about all the library things, but the things I do have got to fit our community. I have let projects go because they don’t work, but that’s the nature of this thing–you have to keep figuring it out until you get a sense of what will work at your library. It takes time. (You have to think like a startup.)

For example, last year, to keep the library on the radar, besides my monthly email update, I was also doing a weekly feature called Tech Tuesday where I would share three apps, websites, or other technology tool. It was really time-consuming, and I never really heard back from anyone, so I stopped after a couple of months. What purpose was it serving? Was it just to keep people reminded about the Library in a non-traditional-to-them way? I realized right then that it was pointless to do this. As faculty, we are inundated with emails–committee updates, college advertisements, listservs, etc. I was just adding to the information overload problem and making myself frustrated.

Fast forward to this year. What I did for faculty and staff at the beginning of the semester (about 3 weeks in) was one big online newsletter using Smore. It was bright and colorful, and it had a hilarious video about books that parodied Mark Ronson’s/Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk.” I got great feedback! Our small campus also has an email newsletter called Tuesday Tidbits (it used to be called the Monday Memo) where faculty submit updates for committees on which they serve as our campus’ representatives and other relevant campus news. Our faculty lead puts it together. Since more people read that, after I did my initial newsletter and email introduction, I started supplying updates on a weekly basis to Tidbits. In my first update this semester, I also resubmitted the link to my initial online newsletter for those who may have missed it. It seems to be going a lot better doing it this way!

Our college recently started a distance education newsletter for updates related to online education. The distance education coordinator, who is also a history professor, recently asked for people to send ideas they may have for the newsletter. Since I am really into DIY visual content, I asked her if she thought a resource list for online presentation and infographic-making tools might be of value (obviously, this also has value for web-enhanced classes). I didn’t want to start off with “this is what the Library can do for you, etc.” Plus, since this is for the whole district, it’s probably not appropriate for me to do anything like that without talking to my colleagues or our temporary director! I actually would really love to write on the behalf of the Library, but my hope is that maybe the list will show that we should be writing something, perhaps on a rotational basis?

Anyway, the DE coordinator agreed! I submitted my draft last night. Distance education is the hot thing in our college district, so I suspect this might be a great place to spread the word about online library services and librarian expertise. I am hoping this can help solve our district-wide library faculty-instructional faculty communication (image?) problem. We actually do a lot of face-to-face advocating, but since there are only four of us, we only can go so far.

Smore

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I am obsessed with Smore. Smore is a fast way to make flyers and newsletters online. Last year, I started using Smore for our new book lists. (In the pre-Lindsay years, the library media technician and clerks sent out a typed list of titles in email–attached as a Word document. In my first year, I started sending out monthly email updates that included the hyperlinked titles of new books.) Recently, someone asked about newsletters on a library listserv, and I was able to share a book list as an example. I got some nice feedback on the one I shared there, which inspired me to do a library newsletter beyond book titles.

I didn’t do one before because every Tuesday, the faculty lead at our small campus sends out a newsletters called Tuesday Tidbits (it used to be the Monday Memo) in which different faculty members submit committee updates and other news. This first month, I had so much to update, I decided to do one giant newsletter rather than submit to Tuesday Tidbits. Now that I sent an initial newsletter, I probably will do the Tidbits route more often than our own newsletter.

In my last post about displays, I also talked about the new series I am doing called Major Idea. I post our displays to Facebook (Instagram is my next frontier) and in the faculty emails I send out,  but I also decided to put the materials I put on display in a hyperlinked list via Smore, sort of like a pathfinder. My giant library newsletter also links to the display materials lists for the Major Idea displays for psychology and art history and our Women’s Equality Day and water and drought displays.

I was pretty thrilled by the feedback I got from our newsletter. What I love about Smore is that it allows you to see how many views you get, too. Smore only allows you to make five flyers so free, but the educator account is just $60 a year. It is so worth it!

Psychology

August 2015 Library Displays

Lindsay Davis3 Comments

This isn’t anything mind blowing as far as libraries go, but I really believe in the power of displays in showcasing not only resources but also getting library users to discover a new topic or idea they might not think up on their own.

My library is two thousand square feet, and our campus serves about 1800 students. We don’t have a lot of space for displays, but I use all the nooks and crannies and sometimes a book cart parked by the research help desk. I mostly use the lower reference shelving underneath a giant window, which, unfortunately, is in the back of the library, but it’s closest to the main bank of study tables.

There is a section within the higher reference shelving I’ve carved out with shifting and weeding. It’s the space I have dubbed Major Idea in which I’ll be displaying books and databases related to a topic or idea within a major offered by the college. First up is psychology.

It’s not pictured, but I also am advertising the services offered by the academic counselors and our new career counselor for those interested in the psychology major and/or careers in psychology. I also have a college catalog on display. (When I went to check on the display the next day, the illustrated Interpretation of Dreams had been checked out! )

Psychology

August 18th was the 95th anniversary of the 19th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. August 26th is Women’s Equality Day, which celebrates the 19th Amendment’s ratification.

Women's Equality Day

Since I snapped this photo, I’ve shuffled things around and also added resources about the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Act banned racial discrimination in elections, which enfranchised more women and men of color, especially in the South. It’s an incomplete story without this bit of history.

Here is the online flyer for Women’s Equality Day and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Since we’re in California’s Central Valley, drought has been ever-present the last few years. Both college campuses have brown lawns, and we’re proud! I put up a display about water and drought materials, a quick list of relevant websites and databases, and I incorporated some interactivity by asking how students cut back on water usage this summer. Since it’s in an awkward spot, I didn’t expect more answers beyond my own example on a Post-It, but I was pleasantly surprised.

Water Conservation Drought Websites Drought Ideas

This year, I’m going to see if I can get our student workers and staff to participate in some displays. Now that I have evening colleagues, I asked one of them if she’d like to do the Banned Books display this September. It’s always a fun one to do, but September is just really busy with many other events, displays, and information

Library Services Flyer Aimed at Faculty

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I go back to the community college library tomorrow. I’m looking forward to the new year. I have some fun ideas to work on, and I am feeling more confident about my abilities. It also helps to let go of those things you cannot control or all the things you wish you could do but can’t for any number of reasons, etc.

I meant to have a flyer for library services aimed at faculty ready to go by Monday, but I won’t be ordering the flyers through the college’s Print Services department until tomorrow. Since I work at the smaller of the college district’s campuses, our mail gets delivered through a courier once a day. I should get them by the end of the week. Here’s what I did through Canva, which is one of my absolute favorite tools I use at work.

Aim Your Students for Research Success

I also plan to update our flyer for students (it’s actually half-page size). For the last two years, I have only ordered it in black and white on light yellow card stock as it cuts back on costs, but it doesn’t match my style or the culture I’ve worked so hard to mold the last two years. I’m hoping to create something similar to the one I made for faculty this year. I’ll work on it this week while waiting for the faculty flyer.

Scrabble Banner

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Library GamesI absolutely love this Scrabble banner tutorial: http://sarahhearts.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/scrabble-banner.pdf 

I used it for our inaugural library game night in October 2014, and I have also used it for our campus’ Fall Festival, and our library game night this past spring 2015. I just keep it in a manila folder, so it doesn’t get tangled.

A few words on the tutorial. Our color printer at work is extremely old and not very powerful, so what I did was print it out in black and white on regular computer paper, and then I ran the letters I needed through the copy machine onto kraft cardstock I got at the local Wal-Mart, which is the closest store to campus. I had twine at home. The only other supplies you need are scissors or a paper cutter and a single hole punch.

It came out super cute. What do you think? I am going to make a “welcome” banner for the library window facing out to the hallway (we’re a room in the Student Services building, so the hall is hot real estate) for the first week back to school.

Reuse, Recycle, Share

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I usually just browse American Libraries magazine. A lot of what’s in there isn’t always relevant for me, but sometimes there are things of note. In the January/February issue, Meredith Farkas wrote a piece called “Reuse, Recycle, Share.” She writes, “We spend a lot of energy trying to create things from scratch when, frequently, another library may have already done something very similar.” As the only full-time faculty librarian on duty at my campus during the daytime, I definitely don’t have the time to come up with fantastic new ideas or create refined tools, so I am always looking for things like instructional videos or handouts college libraries have made and licensed through Creative Commons. (It took me a long time to realize that borrowing ideas didn’t mean I wasn’t creative; see Brain Pickings’ post, “Austin Kleon on 10 Things Every Creative Person Should Remember But We Often Forget.”) One of my favorite librarian groups that is generous with their ideas and templates is ACRL’s Library Marketing and Outreach interest group.

Earlier this summer, outreach librarian Stacy Taylor posted a great display she did with emojis. It is the perfect addition to my new display idea, Major Idea. Last semester, I weeded four shelves worth of reference items that were outdated, so it created a little, slightly awkward opening for display space. I needed it to more purposeful, so I came up with an idea that will highlight a topic/subject that relates to a major/degree the college offers (how about Renaissance art featuring this image, some books, print outs of some e-book covers, a database recommendation, and maybe some info on art history majors nearby…?) I will have to test it out, but I had planned to kick off with psychology, so how perfect would emoji books be as a fun addition? The old, naive me would have re-created this idea from scratch, but the starting-on-my-third year me asked if she had some kind of ready-made document, and Stacy kindly sent me her titles and emojis via Google Docs, and I downloaded that puppy. I am so grateful for the time Stacy’s document will be saving me!

My thought is that we will be switching out the Major Idea area every two weeks, but I will be asking for help from the student workers, staff, and the two part-time evening librarians to take a turn, so that we all get to be creative, contribute, and learn more about our resources while researching ideas, books, and databases. I also wrote some preliminary guidelines, which include promoting an e-book or two and subject databases, as well as an explanation about the purpose, and that asking for help is perfectly okay. I realize not everyone is as comfortable with displays as I am, but I definitely need more help to get things rolling now. I will be kicking off as an example, which is sort of not the best since I want people to feel free in their creativity, but I am the only one who will be around before school starts to get that part of the Library ready.

As I write, I’m looking at my monthly display calendar, and it’s a little overwhelming, but with help from fellow library staff and librarian friends sharing fantastic ideas, we can make it happen together.

Left My Librarian Heart in San Francisco

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I went to my first American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference in 2010, just a mere semester and a couple of weeks into library school. I was doing a fellowship in DC at the time, and the conference happened to take place there that summer. It was incredibly overwhelming because it’s a giant conference, and I didn’t know anyone or much of anything back then. After that, I didn’t go for a few years. I had promised myself that I wouldn’t go until I was working somewhere full-time. At one point, I was working four library positions, so it was hard to take time off as a part-time employee. I was also really concerned with saving money because my husband was working so hard while I was in school and hunting for a full-time job; it made me feel bad not to be contributing as much as he was putting in.

Fast track, so I went to the conference in Las Vegas last year. I meant to start this blog after I got back to talk about all the things I went to and saw, but now I’ve come back from the conference in San Francisco.

This year, I took my sister with me. Kory, my husband, was going to go with me, but it ended up not working out with his job. My sister and I played Eloise at The Plaza for a few days since I booked at the Westin St. Francis. It’s so fancy it took a minute to figure out the elevator. In between my conference sessions, meetings, and meet-ups, we had a fabulous time shopping, eating Thai, crashing in on the Philippine Independence Day outdoor concert featuring Jessica Sanchez, and catching bits of the SF Pride Parade.

What I love about the craziness of ALA is that it’s mashup of everything library–you can be talking to a public library director, teacher librarian, vendor, dean of library services, reference librarians, librarians who don’t work in libraries. It’s everyone from the rock stars to the in-the-trenches librarians. This happened to me last year. I didn’t realize who I was talking to was a more well-known person until half an hour had passed because Twitter pics are not the same. I almost died. lol

The meeting I most anticipated this year was the Association of College and Research Libraries Library Marketing and Outreach interest group (ACRL LMO IG). Last year, I found myself at a really small meeting for a new interest group. This group has really given me something to focus on in the midst of all the things I can’t necessarily do at work. The IG is just a place to share ideas and inspire others. The idea is that states will have their own meet-ups. I signed up to be Central CA’s rep for ACRL LMO IG last year, and I recruited a librarian at the local UC to help me begin tapping into the Sacramento-Fresno area, but for one reason or another, we didn’t get started. As luck would have it, I happened upon a librarian from a private university about 30 minutes north of me who was on sabbatical when I had contacted her about getting together to form a regional group. I’m excited to see if we can wake up our sleepy area. Those So Cal and Nor Cal librarians are a little more social than the Central CA bunch.

Here’s what else I went to:

Lucha Corpi, Javier Huerta, and Viola Canales: Mexican-American Poetry Panel reminded me of my childhood–making trips to the discount supermarket, visiting Don Juan Foods where my mom worked as a cashier in between cannery seasons at Del Monte, and eating raspas and playing Lotería with my cousins. My upbringing in a tight-knit Mexican-American family in an even tighter-knit Protestant domination has had such a significant impact on my life, I can’t even explain but in poetry. And I haven’t written poetry in many years, partly because I’m not very good at it.

Framing and Enhancing Visual Literacy: Using the New ACRL Framework to Develop Effective Art Instruction was a really great panel that featured librarians at different institutions who incorporate visual literacy into their instruction based on the new framework and Standards for Information Literacy. There were some great lessons and ideas for how to do this, but the one that sticks out to me most was a lesson on how an image of a snake charmer became the image associated with Mami Watta, an African water goddess.

Current Topics Discussion (ACRL IS), which focused on how to establish and strength our partnerships with faculty members, which was led by Amy Wainwright, a fantastic librarian I have gotten to know a little bit through ACRL LMO IG. We discussed problems we have, as well as possible solutions for improving our relations with faculty members. Because I’m at such a small campus, I kind of have an edge when it comes to this, but there is always room to improve, and I know that my slight shyness does get in the way.

Multimodal Literacy and Comics, which focused on how comics can help people see different viewpoints, particularly those from the position of a person of color. These provide another narrative that students might not encounter in school which focuses on the traditional canon. I’m a person who wasn’t exposed to comics until I was 20, and by exposure I mean not exactly reading them but getting to know someone who reads them. I also grew up not having books with characters with my family dynamic in a bilingual/bi-racial household. Let me say, when Marisol MacDonald Doesn’t Match arrived at the public library I was working in at the time, I cried made me cried in the children’s department workroom.

PR Xchange is basically displays and examples of libraries’ marketing materials that you can take home. If you know me, you know that I absolutely love this stuff. That’s a nice display sign,” is something I say on a regular basis. Not that my own designs are gorgeous; my job is way too Jill of all trades to be perfection in one area.

And a million posters…

But I found it on Google: Teaching college students Critical Digital Literacy

College student engagement in information literacy activities across the disciplines

Dogs, Donuts and other Distractions: Assessing Finals Week Activities at Academic Libraries

One-Shot Assessment on the Fly: Using Free Mobile Technology and Polling Software

Plotting a new “maptastic” course: building community and unearthing collections through pop-up exhibits Click here for a copy of the poster.

Sustainable Assessment: Using Google Forms for Library Instruction

All in a Day’s Work: Workplace Information Literacy from a Student Perspective

Can You Kern? Librarians as Graphic Designers

The Undergraduate Experience: Is it Enhanced Through Employment as a Library Student Worker? Click here for a copy of the poster.

Wikipedia: Metaliteracy in the digital landscape

I had a great time. I learned a lot. This sort of makes up for having to miss the ACRL conference in March. Next year, the ALA Annual Conference is in Orlando. ACRL won’t happen again until 2017, but CARL, the CA chapter of ACRL has a conference in 2016. I signed up to help out with the planning recently, so I will go to that. I think I might go to Internet Librarian in October. I’ve always wanted to go, and a colleague mentioned to another colleague that it’s one I would probably really enjoy.