How-To

Get More Media Coverage by Adding a Press Room to Your Website
By Kathy Dempsey
Kathy Dempsey, who’s been the editor of MLS for 25 years, looks to her experience as an editor, writer, marketer, and former library worker to list everything she’d like to see in a dedicated press room on a library website. She created her wish list with five main categories: press contact info, library background, images and artwork, press guidelines, and news, then adds some bonus content for good measure. She includes links to, and screenshots of, good examples to help you build your own webpage to serve the media.

Feature

Building a Library Event Space Leads to Promo-Planning Positions
By Marsha Miller and Dara Middleton
This duo from Indiana State University (ISU) shares their tale of building and rebuilding PR and marketing teams and how full-time positions were created, then morphed over time. The driving factors behind these shifting workflows were changes in the deans who oversee ISU’s library and the creation of a 300-seat event space. Running the event space requires constant promotional coordination, but it’s added value to the library’s offerings and sparked a lot of recognition and partnerships across campus.

ICYMI

Smart Communities, Literate Laundromats, and More
By Kathy Dempsey
In this new column, named after the social shorthand for “In Case You Missed It,” MLS editor Kathy Dempsey shares items of interest that you might not have seen. In this issue, she highlights a 3-year project called Enabling Smart, Inclusive, and Connected Communities: The Role of Public Libraries. She shares media coverage of the trend of setting up libraries in laundromats. A popular TV show, The Blacklist, recently aired an episode in which characters did research at the Library of Congress. Finally, “jeopardy” appears for two opposing reasons—needing money and winning money. The first tidbit says federal IMLS funding is in jeopardy and links to tools to demonstrate your support for it. The second notes media coverage of a Jeopardy! game show winner who says he uses libraries to study before competing. To date, he’s won more than $1 million.

Library Marketing Basics, by Mark Aaron Polger
While this Rowman & Littlefield book has the word “basics” in the title, reviewer Kathy Dempsey explains that those basics are actually the underlying tenets of proper marketing, not simplistic ideas. She compliments the broad range of topics covered in this 315-page book and refers to it as an academic version of her own foundational title, The Accidental Library Marketer.

This issue announces that Syracuse University’s Megan Oakleaf won an ACRL award, EveryLibrary’s Patrick Sweeney won an American Association of Political Consultants award, and Copper Queen Library and Fairfax County Public Library won awards from PLA. In other news, CILIP released a report on treating information as an asset, ALA published a book on book clubs, and ACRL partnered with Gale to create a Libraries Transform toolkit. Finally, ALA has released its annual “State of America’s Libraries” report, and separately, two advocacy tools, one on library stories and one on social media advocacy.