Practical Matters: Prepare, Protect, and Market Your Library

Most libraries in the US are small. For public libraries, this means that the population served is under 25,000 people. Similarly, two-thirds of academic libraries serve institutions with fewer than 3,000 students. When it comes to school libraries and many special libraries, staff numbers are typically small as well.

What this means, practically speaking, is that many librarians work without colleagues at hand to help answer those pesky questions about the mundane work we didn’t learn how to do in library school. (Marketing your library, anyone?) This roundup includes recent titles that may serve as guides to a few of these areas.

Intellectual Freedom

The lessons on intellectual freedom may feel like distant ideals—until an issue arises at your library. With Protecting Intellectual Freedom in Your Public Library: Scenarios from the Front Lines, author June Pinnell-Stephens and ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom have completed the set of three practical guides to the Library Bill of Rights and its interpretations, as well as ALA’s Code of Ethics. For school libraries, check out Protecting Intellectual Freedom in Your School Library: Scenarios from the Front Lines by Pat Scales, and for academic libraries, Protecting Intellectual Freedom in Your Academic Library: Scenarios from the Front Lines by Barbara M. Jones. Like the others in the set, Pinnell-Stephens’s guide contains case studies, sample forms, references for additional reading, and practical advice on some thorny issues facing public libraries: challenges to what’s in a collection, access to resources, privacy, and confidentiality. She also addresses “not books” issues, such as concerns over meeting rooms and bulletin boards.

Indexed. ALA Editions. 160 p. $50. 978-0-8389-3583-5

Marketing

Marketing your library is a constant necessity: Your community needs to be aware of special programs and services, and positive awareness of the value of your library is critical when the time comes to seek support for a new initiative. Marketing Your Library: Tips and Tools that Work is a collection of essays from librarians working in all types of libraries. The mini-case studies—compiled by Carol Smallwood, Vera Gubnitskaia, and Kerol Harrod—provide ideas for using social media, developing your brand, building community partnerships, doing better advocacy, and using programming to raise your library’s profile (and get higher attendance). Like the tips in the Great Library Promotion Ideas series of the late 1980s, published by the John Cotton Dana Library Public Relations Award Committee, these are ideas any library—big or small—can use.

Indexed. McFarland. 231 p. $55. 978-0-7864-6543-9 (Also available as an ebook.)

Disaster Readiness

I grew up in a village that was established 300 years ago. While there had been flooding in the past, the damage was minimal and mostly enriched the flood plain for truck farms in the area. But the aftermath of Hurricane Irene this past fall was different: Among other blows, the village library lost its entire children’s collection. The moral of the story: You may think it won’t happen to you, but it could. The third edition of Miriam B. Kahn’s Disaster Response and Planning for Libraries could be the strategy map you need to prepare for the worst—be it tornado, flood, or fire. Kahn provides the how-tos of preparing an effective plan and executing it well during an emergency.

Indexed. ALA Editions. 176 p. $60. 978-0-8389-1151-8 (Also available as an ebook.)

Cataloging

Without cataloging, materials in a library would be nearly impossible to find. Even though catalog records are readily available, understanding how they are put together to unlock the rich metadata built into a catalog record remains a useful skill. British instructors of cataloging Anne Welsh and Sue Batley have written Practical Cataloging: AACR2, RDA, and MARC21 as a problem-solving guide to the most common cataloging problems found in libraries. It will not be the last book to present the new RDA principles, but because it references AACR2, it serves as a bridge from the standard we have used for a generation to the new standard that could be used for generations to come.

Indexed. Neal-Schuman. 224 p. $75. 9781555707439

Latest Library Links

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Joe Árvai writes: “As artificial intelligence (AI) creeps further into people’s daily lives, so do worries about it. At the most alarmist are concerns about AI going rogue and terminating its human masters. But my own research as a psychologist who studies how people make decisions leads me to believe that all these risks are overshadowed by an even more corrupting, though largely invisible, threat. That is, AI is mere keystrokes away from making people even less disciplined and skilled when it comes to thoughtful decisions.”

The Conversation, Apr. 12
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Tess Prendergast writes: “As someone who teaches contemporary children’s literature, I have been following the surge of picture books about climate and environment topics for several years. While there has been some great scholarly research about such books, I have devised a simple framework for grouping these kinds of books. This four-tiered categorization may help you decided what to read, suggest, or display in various scenarios and for different audiences.”

ALSC Blog, Apr. 11
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Max Eddy writes: “It’s a nightmare scenario: You’ve protected all of your online accounts with two-factor authentication (2FA), but then your phone is broken, lost, or stolen, and you’re locked out of everything. Past You’s effort to protect Future You has made Present You’s life a living hell. 2FA is supposed to keep attackers and scammers out of your online accounts, but what if something happens to your second factor? With a little planning, you can reduce that risk and still keep your accounts safe.”

New York Times Wirecutter, Apr. 12
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Nik Altenberg writes: “About 100 librarians and their supporters rallied outside San Francisco Public Library’s Main Library on April 9 to demand the city hire security guards for every branch. Workers decried a lack of security at most of the city’s branches and said they are often forced to de-escalate volatile situations and step into the role of providing security themselves. The rally is the latest in a series of union actions [from 10 unions representing more than 25,000 city workers across city departments] seeking to draw attention to what they say is a pervasive understaffing crisis.”

KQED-TV (San Francisco), Apr. 9
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“Two years after Brooklyn Public Libraries’ (BPL) launch of Books Unbanned, an initiative to protect the freedom to read for young people, In Their Own Words: Youth Voices on Books Unbanned gives new insight into the impact of censorship on teen and young adults across the US and how restrictions and other barriers to access build upon and reinforce each other. The new report, published April 11 by BPL and Seattle Public Library, analyzes 855 stories shared by young people who signed up for a free Books Unbanned ecard from April 2022 through December 2023.”

Seattle Public Library, Apr. 11
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Samantha Guss, Sojourna Cunningham, and Jennifer Stout write: “Recruitment and retention are both critical to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in academic libraries, and failing to improve retention has and will continue to derail these initiatives. Research that addresses retention tends to focus on proposed strategies, such as stay interviews (structured interviews aimed at strengthening employee and employer relationships) and mentorship programs. But there is no agreed-upon definition of retention that would allow us to assess these strategies. We should recognize that involuntary staying can be just as negative an outcome for the individual and the organization as leaving, setting the stage for legacy toxicity.”

In The Library With The Lead Pipe, Apr. 10
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Jackie Edwards writes: “As spring rolls around, seasonal allergies can flare up among library workers, resulting in symptoms like sneezing; runny or stuffy nose; itchy eyes, ears, and nose; coughing; and asthma. Not only are these symptoms detrimental to well-being and productivity, but they can also mean you’re less able to provide excellent customer service to library users. Fortunately, by purifying the air, preventing mold, and keeping your work area clean, you can improve indoor air quality and combat allergies in your library.”

Library Worklife, Apr.