This book illustrates crowdsourcing techniques that will help you to raise money and collect community knowledge so your library can be its most impactful. This informative guide teaches you how to strengthen your library's collections and services and develop your relationships with patrons by crowdsourcing ideas, support, and skills from your community. Citing success stories from libraries across the country, it also specifies tactics that will help you to serve specific demographic groups, including children, teens, and adults. You'll learn how to more exactly meet your patrons' needs by welcoming suggestions for improvements to your library. To raise money for special projects, you'll learn how to garner the necessary support; the author explains what types of funding campaigns are particularly suited to crowdsourcing and offers concrete steps for executing crowdfunding library initiatives. Moreover, you'll learn how to act as your community's documentarian by using crowdsourcing to gather and preserve community knowledge such as local history, providing your community with a reservoir of information from which it can draw for years to come.
Think Big: A Resource Manual for Library Programs That Attract Large Teen Audiences is a how-to manual for librarians who want to attract large groups of teens to their libraries with meaningful, memorable events. Large programs may seem to be impossible to attempt until the project is broken down into the separate parts needed. Think Big begins with those separate parts necessary to create a large event, starting with the logistics of time and place, the budget and how to find funding, making a timeline to make everything fall into place, communication among all of the people involved, marketing to the teen audience, troubleshooting with thorough preparation, and the importance of evaluations for reporting and for future planning. Part 2 is a collection of best practices. Seventeen successful, large programs are included, contributed by librarians who have dared to think big and made it work. Included are the book and author programs in school and public libraries. There are also creative programs about poetry and dance, STEM activities, pop culture, and school and work. Every section has two to four programs. Each program explains how the program began and evolved to the event it is today. A timeline, how the program was financed, who assisted to make every step successful, how the program was publicized, and how evaluations were collected and written are provided in detail to empower a librarian to tackle their first-time big program.
In this book, author Stephanie Katz, founding editor of the award-winning literary journal 805 Lit + Art, shares practical tools and advice for starting successful creative publishing projects. Publishing benefits libraries by providing high-quality content to patrons, showcasing local writers and faculty, and creating buzz for the library. These endeavors can be launched at any type and size of library, often for little to no cost. Libraries Publish teaches libraries how to publish literary magazines, book review blogs, local anthologies, picture books, library professional journals, and even novels. You'll learn how to run a writing contest or writer-in-residence program, form community partnerships with other literary organizations, find funding, navigate legal considerations, market your publication, and more. Each chapter contains detailed information on how to start your project, including comprehensive checklists, recommendations for free software, and legal considerations. Social media strategies as well as tips for facilitating student or teen-run projects are also covered. If your library wants to start a publishing project, this book will be your go-to resource!
Whether we need to make better financial choices, find the love of our life, or transform our career, crowdsourcing is the key to making quicker, wiser, more objective decisions. But few of us even come close to tapping the full potential of our online personal networks. Lior Zoref offers proven guidelines for applying what he calls "mind sharing" in new ways. For instance, he shows how a mother's Facebook update saved the life of a four-year-old boy, and how a manager used LinkedIn to create a year's worth of market research in less than a day. Zoref's clients are using his techniques to innovate and problem-solve in record time. Now he reveals how crowdsourcing has the ability to supercharge our thinking and upgrade every aspect of our lives.
This Toolkit provides you with everything you need to successfully market any library. As libraries continue to fight for their survival amid growing expectations, competition from online sources and wavering public perceptions, effective marketing is increasingly becoming a critical tool to ensure the continued support of users, stakeholders and society as a whole. This unique practical guide offers expert coverage of every element of library marketing and branding for all sectors including archives and academic, public and special libraries, providing innovative and easy-to-implement techniques and ideas. The book is packed with case studies highlighting best practice and offering expert advice from thought-leaders including David Lee King and Alison Circle (US), Terry Kendrick and Rosemary Stamp (UK), Alison Wallbutton (New Zealand) and Rebecca Jones (Canada), plus institutions at the cutting-edge of library marketing including the British Library, New York Public Library, the National Archive, Cambridge University, JISC, the National Library of Singapore and the State Library of New South Wales. The key topics covered in the text are: • Seven key concepts for marketing libraries • Strategic marketing • The library brand • Marketing and the library building • An introduction to marketing online • Marketing with social media • Marketing with new technologies • Marketing and people • Internal marketing • Library advocacy as marketing • Marketing Special Collections and archives. Readership: The book is supplemented by a companion website and is essential reading for anyone involved in promoting their library or information service, whether at an academic, public or special library or in archives or records management. It’s also a useful guide for LIS students internationally who need to understand the practice of library marketing.
Focusing on academic libraries and librarians who are extending the boundaries of e-learning, this collection of essays presents new ways of using information and communication technologies to create learning experiences for a variety of user communities. Essays feature e-learning projects involving MOOCs (massive open online courses), augmented reality, chatbots and other innovative applications. Contributors describe the process of project development, from determination of need, to exploration of tools, project design and user assessment.
“The amount of knowledge and talent dispersed among the human race has always outstripped our capacity to harness it. Crowdsourcing corrects that—but in doing so, it also unleashes the forces of creative destruction.” —From Crowdsourcing First identified by journalist Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired article, “crowdsourcing” describes the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few. Howe reveals that the crowd is more than wise—it’s talented, creative, and stunningly productive. Crowdsourcing activates the transformative power of today’s technology, liberating the latent potential within us all. It’s a perfect meritocracy, where age, gender, race, education, and job history no longer matter; the quality of work is all that counts; and every field is open to people of every imaginable background. If you can perform the service, design the product, or solve the problem, you’ve got the job. But crowdsourcing has also triggered a dramatic shift in the way work is organized, talent is employed, research is conducted, and products are made and marketed. As the crowd comes to supplant traditional forms of labor, pain and disruption are inevitable. Jeff Howe delves into both the positive and negative consequences of this intriguing phenomenon. Through extensive reporting from the front lines of this revolution, he employs a brilliant array of stories to look at the economic, cultural, business, and political implications of crowdsourcing. How were a bunch of part-time dabblers in finance able to help an investment company consistently beat the market? Why does Procter & Gamble repeatedly call on enthusiastic amateurs to solve scientific and technical challenges? How can companies as diverse as iStockphoto and Threadless employ just a handful of people, yet generate millions of dollars in revenue every year? The answers lie within these pages. The blueprint for crowdsourcing originated from a handful of computer programmers who showed that a community of like-minded peers could create better products than a corporate behemoth like Microsoft. Jeff Howe tracks the amazing migration of this new model of production, showing the potential of the Internet to create human networks that can divvy up and make quick work of otherwise overwhelming tasks. One of the most intriguing ideas of Crowdsourcing is that the knowledge to solve intractable problems—a cure for cancer, for instance—may already exist within the warp and weave of this infinite and, as yet, largely untapped resource. But first, Howe proposes, we need to banish preconceived notions of how such problems are solved. The very concept of crowdsourcing stands at odds with centuries of practice. Yet, for the digital natives soon to enter the workforce, the technologies and principles behind crowdsourcing are perfectly intuitive. This generation collaborates, shares, remixes, and creates with a fluency and ease the rest of us can hardly understand. Crowdsourcing, just now starting to emerge, will in a short time simply be the way things are done.
Crowdsourcing, or asking the general public to help contribute to shared goals, is increasingly popular in memory institutions as a tool for digitising or computing vast amounts of data. This book brings together for the first time the collected wisdom of international leaders in the theory and practice of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage. It features eight accessible case studies of groundbreaking projects from leading cultural heritage and academic institutions, and four thought-provoking essays that reflect on the wider implications of this engagement for participants and on the institutions themselves. Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage is more than a framework for creating content: as a form of mutually beneficial engagement with the collections and research of museums, libraries, archives and academia, it benefits both audiences and institutions. However, successful crowdsourcing projects reflect a commitment to developing effective interface and technical designs. This book will help practitioners who wish to create their own crowdsourcing projects understand how other institutions devised the right combination of source material and the tasks for their ’crowd’. The authors provide theoretically informed, actionable insights on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage, outlining the context in which their projects were created, the challenges and opportunities that informed decisions during implementation, and reflecting on the results. This book will be essential reading for information and cultural management professionals, students and researchers in universities, corporate, public or academic libraries, museums and archives.
Whole Person Librarianship guides librarians through the practical process of facilitating connections among libraries, social workers, and social services; explains why those connections are important; and puts them in the context of a national movement. Collaboration between libraries and social workers is an exploding trend that will continue to be relevant to the future of public and academic libraries. Whole Person Librarianship incorporates practical examples with insights from librarians and social workers. The result is a new vision of library services. The authors provide multiple examples of how public and academic librarians are connecting their patrons with social services. They explore skills and techniques librarians can learn from social workers, such as how to set healthy boundaries and work with patrons experiencing homelessness; they also offer ideas for how librarians can self-educate on these topics. The book additionally provides insights for social work partners on how they can benefit from working with librarians. While librarians and social workers share social justice motivations, their methods are complementary and yet still distinct—librarians do not have to become social workers. Librarian readers will come away with many practical ideas for collaboration as well as the ability to explain why collaboration with social workers is important for the future of librarianship.
Crowdsourcing, or asking the general public to help contribute to shared goals, is increasingly popular in memory institutions as a tool for digitising or computing vast amounts of data. This book brings together for the first time the collected wisdom of international leaders in the theory and practice of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage. It features eight accessible case studies of groundbreaking projects from leading cultural heritage and academic institutions, and four thought-provoking essays that reflect on the wider implications of this engagement for participants and on the institutions themselves. This book will be essential reading for information and cultural management professionals, students and researchers in universities, corporate, public or academic libraries, museums and archives.
