Thursday 15 January 2009

Librarian name change

I read in The Daily Telegraph of 13th January 2009 (page 13) about "Librarians reject name change":

"Changes to the library system in Edinburgh that would have involved renaming librarians "audience development officers" are likely to be rejected by the city council.
Librarians threatened to strike over the proposals, which would have meant self-service borrowing systems in which customers scanned books in and out themselves.

Audience Development Officers? Naah!!!!.........I wouldn't like it. Why not work on improving the image of "librarian" rather than thinking of creative titles to replace it?

I agree on this statement on marketing of libraries:

“I think we need to promote librarians even more than we need to promote libraries. Very few people know what librarians do and fewer know what training and education we have. People seem to think all we do is read, check books out and shelve them”.

From “Libraries in transition to a marketing orientation” in International Journal of
Volunteering Sector Marketing, November 2007

Tuesday 13 January 2009

Wordle again


I wanted to make a bookmark for our library, we do send out books by post, so why not add something useful to remind our readers about us?
It would have the usual things like contact details and opening hours, but I don't want too much text on it either, I was thinking of adding a word cloud like the above.

It doesn't make sense, nothing to read, but it is a picture made of words and all these words describe us, so basically it is a picture of us, the library.
I made it in Wordle.net

It is not that after doing the marketing your library course that I have come up with an idea of a bookmark, this is something that I wanted to do last year as well. It could have been a little flyer, but a bookmark is a little tool that has use to the reader and is kept, most importantly it is useful! We want to get a message out about us and what we can offer, we are not talking about a nationwide 2 months campaign here!

If it turns out that I get permission to use this for our first bookmark, I will mean I have found out what Wordle can be used for, something I questioned in an earlier blog entry.