This is where people start to get nervous when doing advocacy work.
“I don’t know what to say!”
“I don’t want to talk about money!”
“What if I ask, and they turn me down??” (And what if they laugh at me? And chase me down the hallway? And steal my lunch money??)
Fortunately, most of these fears are pretty groundless. But it’s worth taking a couple of minutes here to talk about some strategies for working with funders and politicians.
Advocacy for libraries is pretty easy! Generally, people like libraries, and see the value in having a good library. Sometimes you need to whip out an elevator speech on “this is why Google will never replace a librarian” but that should be simple enough. Rattle off a quick list of a few things your library does each week, and doubters are stunned into silence.
Advocacy is talking to people, telling them about your library, your materials, your services, and all the things you do there. Dealing with funders is just the same: tell them what you are doing in your library, and how you are spending their money. Continue reading Working with politicians and funders (Advocacy Series #4)→
Caching: a game, an exploration, and adventure! And a way to talk about libraries!!
If you have not already read our blog on Geocaching in the Library, you may want to go back and do a quick review.
To encourage people to get outside and explore, and to hear about the value of libraries from all kinds of sources (it is Advocacy month here at CMLE, after all!), we created five Travel Bugs. We are starting to drop these in geocaches around the area, and have instructions for finders to take them to libraries and move them along.
When a cacher finds one of our travel bugs, they will be taken to the Travel Bug page on our website. Here you can get some quick info about CMLE, and get links to all five of our Travel Bugs (TBs). You can click on each one, and then click (top right hand corner) to follow the TB and get notifications when it moves. This can be fun if the TB gets to visit libraries, as requested; and you can see all the different places the TBs go! (In a previous travel bug project I did to highlight libraries along the Lewis and Clark Trail, TBs I dropped along the way ended up going all over the world!!)
Our first TB has been dropped! It is called Take Me To Your Library; and it could not be in a better cache: Hermione Granger’s book trading cache. This cache has books available to trade -just the thing to warm the heart of any library fan! I was very excited to find this in a really beautiful part outside Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The sun was just starting to go down, my phone’s battery was starting to die; and just as I was about to give up, a deer was standing on the path in front of me! I stopped where I was and looked over to the left – and there was the cache! It was a great find, and I was very excited to drop our first TB there.
Are you in the area? Go find this one!! You can move it along to another cache, and we want to hear all about it. Or just click on the link to follow its adventures!
Do you cache?? Does your library have a cache, or any Travel Bugs??? We want to hear from you! We will have more Travel Bug updates, as ours get dropped and head out for library-related adventures and fun!
We all know copyright laws are important. Definitely.
And we want to obey them, and to help our colleagues and patrons to do so as well. But it’s hard! It is federal law, and covers hundreds of years! (The first Copyright act was signed by George Washington in 1790.)
We are often expected to be the experts in copyright, and to help adjudicate the material for others. But the secret most of us harbor in our hearts is this: it’s just so confusing, too often we are guessing.
Whew! Everyone feel better now that we all know we ALL feel a lack of knowledge on this? Good!
Fortunately, there is information not only available but easily understandable! And it’s fun enough that you won’t mind sharing it to with patrons, Board members, or anyone else who needs a quick refresher!
“A documentary is being filmed. A cell phone rings, playing the “Rocky” theme song. The filmmaker is told she must pay $10,000 to clear the rights to the song. Can this be true? “Eyes on the Prize,” the great civil rights documentary, was pulled from circulation because the filmmakers’ rights to music and footage had expired. What’s going on here? It’s the collision of documentary filmmaking and intellectual property law, and it’s the inspiration for this new comic book. Follow its heroine Akiko as she films her documentary, and navigates the twists and turns of intellectual property. Why do we have copyrights? What’s “fair use”? Bound By Law reaches beyond documentary film to provide a commentary on the most pressing issues facing law, art, property and an increasingly digital world of remixed culture.”
They are working to distribute this to everyone who needs it. So there are free digital copies available to anyone. And you can buy paper copies, either as single copies or 25 or more at an educator’s discount.
Do you just want to spend a few minutes watching an entertaining, and educational, video on copyright? Sure! Why not??
This is a video that is NOT a copyright violation, due to it’s very (VERY!) brief usage of Disney moves to explain the basics of copyright law – including the role Disney has played in extending the laws.
Copyright is a huge issue in so many libraries today. CMLE Headquarters will help to organize some training on this issue, or to help libraries connect with each other to talk about the specific issues they are facing in their daily work. We will also periodically add material here to this site, so you can reference it when you need it.
This could you you! The fame! The fortune! The recognition from your peers!! It could all be yours!
CMLE members, and other devoted readers, we want you!!
We want your ideas! We want your experiences! We want to know what is going on in your corner of the library world!!
As part of our commitment to reach out to members across the system, to connect everyone together, and to help all our members to be successful, Guest Blogging is already playing a role in sharing information. As library people, we all benefit from sharing information.
So, let’s have it!!
You are the expert in your area. You have valuable information to share. You may have a great, inspiring, and heartwarming story of patron services that will bring a tear to the eye of everyone who reads it. You may have a story of funding gone so wrong that we shudder in our nightmares just thinking about it.
More realistically – you probably have an interesting service. Or a new piece of art. Or some thoughts about a new database or encyclopedia.
Whatever.
We want to hear it! Your colleagues also want to hear it! So make your voice heard!!
Email us at CMLE Headquarters, and we will send you some guidelines on creating a Guest Blog. Or, just go nuts, bang away at the keyboard for a few minutes, and proudly send us the results!!
(Can you tell this is not a high-stress activity?? It’s really not.)
Questions? Thoughts? Want to just share an idea and get us to do the heavy lifting of writing it up? Any of these are possible!
Get on this today!!! We want to hear from you – and are sitting by the computer, excitedly waiting for you 🙂
Stakeholders are the lifeblood of a library. They are our audience and our supporters. We need to keep them happy, and to give them all the materials and services they want and need. We need to justify our expenditures and our existence to them.
In short: Stakeholders are a big deal.
But who are they? How do we find them? Could they be labeled (maybe with a nice bar code) so we can be sure we are there for them?? (Short answer: No. That would be way too easy!)
Identify Stakeholders
Identification is both a challenge, and the easiest part of it all. Sit down at your desk, or with your colleagues, and make a list of the first people you can think of who are important to your library – who have a stake in it.
Pretty easy, right? Sophomores, tiny kids and their parents. Provosts and Mayors. Doctors, prisoners, soccer moms. Essentially it’s the people in your neighborhood.
