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From places for building social connections to driving personal empowerment, communities lean on their public libraries. Communities also trust their libraries to help steward the growth of the next generation. Illustrating these dynamics, EveryLibrary Institute recently released the results of its “Public Libraries and Book Bans – Parent Perception Survey.”
Here are a few of the high-level findings:
- 92% of parents, grandparents, and guardians trust librarians to curate books and materials.
- 90% said they’re comfortable allowing their children to choose their own books.
- 96% feel that their children are safe within the library.
- 83% agree that librarians know what books children would love.
- 77% agree that librarians make the library a place for fun and creativity.
- 85% agree librarians support their children’s learning.
- 91% of parents and guardians say they trust public librarians.
Overall, parents/guardians and local communities confer a significant level of trust in public libraries and library staff, especially when it comes to recommendations for children. This directly flows into the topic of how your library builds and promotes its reading/item lists. When we hear from our Partner Libraries, we get a sense that their lists play many key roles, not least:
- Engaging the local community on many key issues.
- Supporting the needs of patrons, especially the underserved or underrepresented.
- Promoting local community organizations and events.
- Driving local organizations and people in the community to advocate for the library.
Using the experiences of our Partner Libraries, we’ll examine what goes into building impactful and engaging lists. Not only that but also explore how to produce those lists at scale. For deeper insights, we also recommend watching the BiblioCon ’23 session by Abby Bass (Seattle Public Library), Alisha Helms (Kansas City Public Library), Gregg Winsor (Johnson County Library), and Jessica Pryde (Pima County Public Library).
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What Goes into an Effective List?
Source: Seattle Public Library
If you’re looking for a starting point, then our Partner Libraries stress this crucial step: making your lists (and your library’s efforts at large) reflect the diversity of your community. Everyone in your local community – especially the marginalized and underserved – should see themselves in your lists.
In addition, produce your lists in a timely and relevant manner. Aim to engage topics or issues of interest to your community when they matter the most.
For example, create a list with resources for parents or guardians prepping their kids for back to school. Or, when producing lists for mental health resources, curate specific lists for different audience groups, like young adults, marginalized BIPOC individuals, and so on. When a major event arises (like the current conflict in the Middle East), make a list with educational materials to help parents and guardians inform and guide their children.
To understand what ideas would best resonate with your community, you can ask patrons and local organizations, especially your community partners. Your strongest community partners will come to you requesting lists of recommended books or other media.
For example, Seattle Public Library was asked by Seattle Rep, the largest nonprofit resident theater in the Pacific Northwest, to create lists to complement their plays. In response, Seattle Public Library created lists by pulling in books, music, and film that touch on each play’s stories and themes. Seattle Rep would then promote those lists to its network, thus giving Seattle Public Library a great advocate in the community.
Likewise, you should seek frequent and frank feedback from your patrons. Get their input on whether your lists reflect who they are and their interests.
Best Practices for Building Impactful Lists
Source: Kansas City Public Library
Build a Policy to Prioritize Your Goals and Drive Best Practices
Start by creating a policy to guide your team on building lists. This can be a great document for setting guardrails and driving positive results. In terms of guardrails, clearly define what your staff are both allowed and prohibited from doing when creating lists. You can emphasize goals like representing diverse and marginalized groups, forging stronger partnerships with local organizations, and joining – or leading – conversations in the community. You can also integrate hard-coded rules into your policy, like upholding your library’s patron privacy guidelines.
Likewise, you can also add recommendations in your policy, like ideas on the types of lists that resonate with your community. You can guide your staff to build lists that engage trending topics, pop culture, or multimedia items in your collections, for example. You can call on them to incorporate a mix of items – from books, films, DVDs, music, and so on – into the list so that it engages different interests. You could also offer guidance on how to write the list by providing examples of strong titles (like “Best of…”) and urging your staff to think about the intended audience and value proposition of their lists.
The team at the Kansas City Public Library provided a great look at how they built the policy/guide for their staff in their BiblioCon ’23 session. We recommend watching the session to get a deeper look at how to build lists. Likewise, the Johnson County Library team provided a look at their internal training program for building lists in the same session. You can use these insights to build your program.
Coordinate With Local Community Partners
Given the earlier example from Seattle Public Library, our Partner Libraries strongly recommend building local partnerships, especially among your community’s other organizations. When these groups come to you with requests for lists, they’ll generally promote your lists to their networks and the wider public. This will give you a two-fold advantage: the community will give you a clearer understanding of what they’re looking for and, in turn, will amplify your library’s lists.
You can also collaborate with local organizations. In a BiblioCon ’23 session, Gregg Winsor (a Readers Advisory Librarian at Johnson County Library) provided a creative example of how his library partnered with the local parks and recreation department to set up a program called “Walk and Read.”
Under the program, the park posted signs with pages from various children’s books so that when parents and kids walk through the pathways, they can read stories together. In addition, each sign also included information about the library as well as a QR code linking back to the library’s wider list. If parents like a particular story, they get a list with related items that they can access at no cost from the library.
Partnerships of this nature help both the library and the other local organizations engage their respective patrons; thus, there’s a mutual benefit. For example, some organizations serve underserved groups who may benefit from the library’s resources. So, it’d make sense to work with those organizations to refer or forward their contacts to their local library. You can start the process by pitching lists with resources and blog posts discussing certain topics.
Comb Your Older Lists
As you build lists, you’ll gradually build an inventory of older lists that, for one reason or another, could become out-of-date or non-functional (broken links, for example). As Gregg from Johnson County Library discussed at BiblioCon ’23, you should regularly review and, where necessary, remove or update older lists. Doing so will ensure that your patrons will only come across current lists, thus giving them a better experience at your library.
Integrate With Your Wider Library Technology Stack
Finally, leverage the right technology to drive your list-building efforts. You’ll reach a point where the community – from patrons to partners – expect relevant and timely lists. Not only that, but you want your lists to be actionable; it’s not enough to provide a list of items, the person reading them should have a direct, frictionless way of accessing those specific items at your library. This will help them get what they’re interested in and, at the same time, drive engagement at your end.
Likewise, when your list building is integrated into other parts of your digital stack, like email marketing or blog posts you can promote your lists in more ways. This will help you reach more people and drive visibility and traffic to your collections from more places (like search engines and social media).
Next Steps
For gleaning the right processes for building impactful lists, we strongly urge you to watch the BiblioCon ’23 session by the teams we spotlighted above. In addition, the following webinar will help you understand how to drive visibility to your overall collections through lists.
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