Examples to Emulate

Inclusive Marketing: Is Your Web Content Accessible to the Visually Impaired and Blind?
By Ashley M. Biggs
It’s easy to be so preoccupied by your website’s content and design that you forget to consider its accessibility. But your site should be useful for people with all sorts of disabilities—and sometimes they are the main target audience. This is the case at the Maryland State Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. The outreach librarian for the MSLBPH, Ashley M. Biggs, walks readers through considerations for web accessibility, including alt tags, headings, transcription, contrast, and compliance. Biggs includes plenty of links so you can dig into the technical details.

ICYMI

Dempsey Marks 25 Years of Editing MLS
By Kathy Dempsey
In this brief column, Kathy Dempsey celebrates the fact that she’s been editing this publication for a quarter century. She shares a few of the many things that have changed in that time, and she points to a longer blog post in which she details her experiences in library marketing since 1994.

Interviews With Marketing Masters

MCPL’s Jim Staley Believes in Segmentation for All
By Judith Gibbons
When Jim Staley started working at the Mid-Continent Public Library in 2007, he launched the Missouri library system’s first formal marketing effort and has built that department to a total of eight people in 2019. In this interview, facilitated by Judith Gibbons, Staley says that even though libraries have something for everyone, it’s vital to target each message toward someone.

This issue carries a double dose of news: Winners have been announced for the annual John Cotton Dana Library Public Relations Awards, the PR Xchange Awards, the Gale/Library Journal Library of the Year award, and ALA’s 2019 Excellence in Library Programming Award. In other news, WebJunction shares community discovery tools, CILIP partners with the EveryLibrary Institute, and EveryLibrary opens its petition platform for others to use. New publications include a Libraries Unlimited book, Political Advocacy for School Librarians; reports from Primary Research Group on using Snapchat and Instagram for marketing; and IMLS’s “Public Libraries Survey” report.