Category Archives: Public Relations

Many of you are familiar or participated in last year’s digital inclusion survey. For those of you who might be new and have not heard about this, please check it out. Now the website can be a bit difficult to navigate, so let’s try and point out a couple of valuable things. While it is certainly encouraged to browse around the site, a good starting point is the interactive map. Recently, the digital inclusion people put a note towards the top of the mapping tool indicating a number of changes to the data, various “enhancements”, and the ability for you to update your own data. The easiest way to get started is to scroll down on the map page to the actual map, and directly above the map is a search box (called library lookup) for your library name (keep in mind that this is the name of the library, not necessarily your city). You can also use one of the draw tools to select a custom area on the map. Once you locate your library from the library lookup feature, the search will retrieve a map on the left and various folders on the right that summarize the following areas (with data pulled from census): Demographics, Economics, Education, Health, and Survey. While this is the same stuff you can get from Census, arguably this might be a more decent starting point or overview of data to better know your library service area. One other thing worth mentioning is that if you click on the map marker for your library you will get a pop-up that summaries the specific digital inclusion data for your library (or library branch). This includes the number of public access computers, broadband speed, technology services/resources, training, and programs/assistance. Underneath the google map photo on the left side of this pop-up, you can change the demographic radius (from 1, 3, 5, or 10 miles), export a summary profile of your library to a PDF (e.g. to hand out to board members, local policy makers, or members of the community), or edit your survey information. If things have changed, please update your information so that the maps are kept up to date. You can do this by clicking on the “Edit Branch & Survey Info” bar (again, just below the google map photo of your library, or the street in front of your library). Shaka.

For those of you that are still fizzed from NLA, you might want to check out the Public Library Association’s Project Outcome. Project Outcome began in January, 2015 as a 3 year project with funding from the Gates Foundation. It is a completely free resource. The idea behind Project Outcome is that it provides tools (meaning surveys given to library users that result in some flashy charts and graphs) to measure outcomes. An outcome is defined as: “a specific benefit that results from a library program or service designed to help patrons change their knowledge, skills, attitudes, behavior, or condition.” Now there are a lot of buzz words surrounding things like Project Outcome, so the Dude will summarize things by saying that Project Outcome is designed to be a simple tool to provide you with a snapshot of how your library is doing (and what you might need to improve on). The Project Outcome people say that the goal is to address the “need for better data to demonstrate the value of your public library programs and services.” The surveys are short (6 questions in length), and cover 7 different areas: civic/community engagement, digital inclusion, early childhood literacy, economic development, education and lifelong learning, job skills, and summer reading. You don’t have to do surveys for all of the areas; rather, you can pick and choose the ones you want.

For more information about the Project, here is the latest webinar, or this video contains an overview of the initiative. Shaka.

After last week’s post, which admittedly was thrown together at the last minute in order to meet the one post a week deadline (yes, I’m playing a self-inflicted weekly match-it game with Lori Sailors), the Dude got to thinking more about libraries and social media. If you look at the library markers on the public library maps from the NLC website, there are links to selected social media sites for each library (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr). The bar chart to the right uses the data from the map, showing the distribution of social media sites used by Nebraska libraries. The data comes from the NLC supplemental survey, and after looking at the supplemental survey, some revision might be in order. How many of you have active Delicious accounts? LibraryThing? These are both options on the supplemental survey but not Pinterest or Instagram. Well, perhaps we will work to revise the supplemental survey so that these might be options. Are there others? If so, let me know.

Now, as the chart illustrates, Facebook (or is it facebook?) is the dominant force here (if you don’t understand why, check out last week’s post (or just look at the bar chart) for a better understanding of the dominance of facebook. Perhaps you could also double check your marker on the aforementioned maps to make sure that they provide the correct link to your library’s social media pages. If they don’t, you can update that information via the supplemental survey. This can be done at any time, although reminders are sent around the time of the public library survey.

Arguably, what’s more important is keeping your social media sites updated. Having a twitter account and only tweeting once a year is neither worthwhile nor effective at getting your message out there. Which brings the Dude to the next point and that is what icon to use for these various sites. Facebook isn’t too difficult, anything with the lower case f on a blue background. Twitter, however is a bit trickier. Do you use the lower case t or one of the variations of the little birdy? Do we assume that everyone knows that the birdy represents twitter?  For Pinterest, the cursive p will do, but should you choose the circle or square background? Flickr’s are a bit more complicated, with numerous blue and pink dots and various renderings of lower case fr’s. The Dude imagines that someday we will have throwback icons similar to that of baseball uniforms and soda packaging (if we don’t already). Shaka.