If you have been to library school, you have heard of S. R. Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Librarianship. It’s a thing that everyone likes to discuss, to help provide a common foundation of ideas and professional attitudes as they build culture for everyone to share no matter where you go.

And probably, you never heard about it again once you made it past that Foundations class, so you forgot the specifics. Or maybe you missed this piece of professional knowledge.

No worries! It’s very simple: (this is from Wikipedia, but there are tons of websites that discuss these ideas)

1. Books are for use.
2. Every person his or her book.
3. Every book its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. The library is a growing organism.

You can see that there is a lot here you can think about, and use to apply to your own library work. We encourage that! We can discuss this later, in another article; and will be happy to come chat with you about library theories and philosophies in your libraries!

Judith A. Seis wrote a really useful book called The Visible Librarian. She discusses strategies for adapting these five laws to creating the basics of a marketing plan! (Check p. 35 – 43 for all the details; I’ll summarize them below.)

Your library needs to have some kind of marketing plan. If you are just hanging around, looking at your books, and hoping nice people will drop by to ask interesting questions, well…..it may be a long wait.  Instead, make even very rudimentary plans for how to get people to connect to the stuff in your library.

In a school, you know you need to keep connecting with teachers to tell them about the cool stuff you have; probably this is the same issue in most special libraries  – you have to identify the people who could benefit from your resources, and go tell them (repeatedly) about it.

A marketing plan lets you figure out how to do this in an efficient way.

So here are Seis’ adapted rules for marketing plans, with my explanatory information:

• Library Resources Are For Use: no more having pointless services just because “we’ve always done this” or holding onto boring dusty books no one ever checks out. There are so many exciting new things to try and to bring in – find the thing that will connect with your community members!
• Every Customer Their Library Resources: Have the things you community needs – but add in some things that will delight them! Every time you add some graphic novels, more books in Somali, a new fish tank – whatever it is, tell people about it! Put it on the website we discussed last week, send it in a newsletter, put up a flyer, post it to social media. Info -> Patron = Job Well Done.
• Every Library Resource Its Customer: Pick something to emphasize that you do well. Are you campus leaders in technology? Are you subject specialists? Are you a one-person library, and ready to provide personalized service?? Find a thing and own it. Then tell the world: Hey! This is my thing!
• Save the Time of the Customer: How can you make people understand, or believe, that you are better and faster than any competition? Provide a variety of ways for them to contact you. We discussed this in last week’s look at your website, but you need to add in an email address, a phone number, and any other way you can think of that someone might want to contact you. Also: know what the common questions people are asking. If it is something that you can fix or adjust – do that to stop the questioning process. If it is something you can link to, post, or otherwise share – do that. Save people time and effort whenever possible!
• The Library is a Growing Organism: I saw this all the time, and it’s always true: Libraries are amazing. Your library is amazing! I cannot tell you how happy and proud I constantly am to be in this profession. One of the things that I like is that we are constantly growing and changing, responding to the needs of the communities we serve. Your community may be elementary school kids and their teachers, it may be doctors and nurses, it may be people coming by for local history. Whoever makes up your community, they want different things in different ways today than they did ten years ago – and will want other different things ten years from now! There is no sitting around on our hands, just coasting and assuming things are fine. Things will not be fine if we don’t work for them. We grow and change, and that is always exciting!!

Okay, so now you have a few basic ideas you can use to advocate for you awesome resources, services, and programs. Stay tuned to this column each week, to keep getting more ideas you can use to show the world how very excellent you really are!!