Who are we ignoring as librarians?
Who are we ignoring as librarians? Are there people we aren't bothering to attract? Is it worth getting them as patrons?
The idea of a public library is that we serve a large audience comprised of the general public. University and school libraries serve students, legal, medical and other libraries all have their own specific targeted group of patrons, but public libraries have to, in theory look after everyone in the community.
The question I want to ask today is, are there people we're ignoring as librarians?
I've not done much work in a public library, two weeks work experience during my time as a student but I did notice that the library had a lot of programs to attract the young and the old but tended to ignore those people in the middle outside of their roles as parents. At least from what I've seen. The writing club I'm a member of has mostly retired people in it, myself and one other guy who is around my age. My retired father goes to the library nearly every day to read the newspaper and when I was doing work in the library a lot of what we did was geared at young kids with their parents(storytime and readings for tots), school kids(homework club and other similar groups) and teenagers(after school activities and clubs) and what we did during the day was geared mostly towards the retired parts of the community or the parents of young kids. There wasn't much to do for people in between these periods in their lives.
I can understand the reasoning behind this because people with jobs tend to have limited free time and public libraries are usually only open during the daytime with maybe one late night during the week and open during the weekends but usually full of kids. Another part of this could be that people outside of high school are often either working full time or at university so they'd use their university library. But after that from the age of twenty-five to about sixty there isn't much which the library really does provide for people outside of their kids(for those of us without kids this means that a library pretty much has no point, which when council budgets start getting kicked around can be a dangerous concept for people who vote to have).
Oddly enough we got a lot of people who didn't have jobs who came in to use the internet to look for work and to check on resumes and such. I remember back during Blogjune 2011 I met a guy who'd told me that a librarian had saved his life by helping him to find work through the libraries webservices. She'd shown him how to use all the websites and other assorted things which helped set him on track.
I started writing today with the thought that we're ignoring these people by accident but I've had an idea that we might be ignoring these people on purpose, mostly because they're the people who least need the services of the library so we don't bother trying to get them in the door. Is it better to save the time and effort on appealing to people who aren't likely to want to show up anyway and putting that capital towards programs which can help those who will?
Or are we just presuming too much about who is willing to come to a library and do stuff and are thus ignoring a solid potential market?
A part of me thinks that the latter is the case, libraries offer ample opportunities for those in the community to meet and talk about things. Book clubs for grown ups have proven popular in some libraries over the last few years, I'm a member of a writing club based in my local library(and joined entirely because a woman I met on a bus got talking with me about how much she enjoyed it, I didn't know about it at all), libraries are now being built with meeting rooms for the public so that we can host events either by the library or hire out the space for private functions. I think that there is a market here which we aren't taking advantage of right now. But I'm not sure what the best way to get it done is.
I think that a good idea would be to emulate book stores and their promotional events, things like author nights might work to get some people into the library who wouldn't otherwise go, the need to use social media to promote some of these things(given the budget issues I already bought up) would require some work as well. I was thinking that with most of the library meeting rooms I've seen having TV Projectors it could be possible to have sports afternoons with live broadcasts of big games for parents to take their kids to where they won't have to worry about alcohol and potential violence but still have a community atmosphere(the upcoming World Cup for example although with the time difference I don't think any games will be held at a good time, 8am, 2am and 2am but the idea holds for other sports maybe after the library is shut for noise reasons). Similarly movie nights, although the movie in the parks which the city does in Brisbane tend to attract more people than could easily fit into a library meeting room, even the big ones.
I'd love to hear, over twitter, what anyone else has to think about this topic. Because as I've said many times before, I'm not an expert in libraries and I'm still not employed at one so I might be missing out on something obvious which libraries have been doing for years that I've somehow missed.
My Day.
I should have gone to work today but I was still feeling a bit crook so I skipped it, I'll be back at full capacity next week I hope, I'm really regretting not going in today right now because by about midday I was feeling really fantastic but I'd already kind of set my afternoon aside and made plans to do things.
I had a Kebab for lunch and settled down to do some reading of the Divine Comedy at my brothers house before I made some Pumpkin soup, which unlike my usual pumpkin soup was actually not bad this time. I think it was because I had it on the stove for almost five hours before I served it up. I usually only have it on for about two hours and it's usually pretty lumpy, this time I got everything just right. I didn't have any guests over for dinner tonight, I tried to get a guy who used to live next door to my brother but he's coming in two weeks time I think(I need to check that actually now that I think of it), I'm thinking of asking my friend who is a keen cyclist to come over.
My brother went to bed pretty late tonight so I'm hoping he'll sleep in tomorrow. I'm hoping that I'll be back at 100% and able to work by Friday, I'm already feeling pretty much over whatever hellish cold I did have.
My dad was meant to get the dogs vaccinated today but wouldn't do it because they refused to give him a bill to pay later(he wanted my mum to pay it because they're her dogs even though he has to look after them) so now I have to email her on her holiday and work it out somehow. I have no idea how I became the middleman in this mess but here I am.
YouTube Video of the Day.
These two girls just love Doctor Who so much.
The idea of a public library is that we serve a large audience comprised of the general public. University and school libraries serve students, legal, medical and other libraries all have their own specific targeted group of patrons, but public libraries have to, in theory look after everyone in the community.
The question I want to ask today is, are there people we're ignoring as librarians?
I've not done much work in a public library, two weeks work experience during my time as a student but I did notice that the library had a lot of programs to attract the young and the old but tended to ignore those people in the middle outside of their roles as parents. At least from what I've seen. The writing club I'm a member of has mostly retired people in it, myself and one other guy who is around my age. My retired father goes to the library nearly every day to read the newspaper and when I was doing work in the library a lot of what we did was geared at young kids with their parents(storytime and readings for tots), school kids(homework club and other similar groups) and teenagers(after school activities and clubs) and what we did during the day was geared mostly towards the retired parts of the community or the parents of young kids. There wasn't much to do for people in between these periods in their lives.
I can understand the reasoning behind this because people with jobs tend to have limited free time and public libraries are usually only open during the daytime with maybe one late night during the week and open during the weekends but usually full of kids. Another part of this could be that people outside of high school are often either working full time or at university so they'd use their university library. But after that from the age of twenty-five to about sixty there isn't much which the library really does provide for people outside of their kids(for those of us without kids this means that a library pretty much has no point, which when council budgets start getting kicked around can be a dangerous concept for people who vote to have).
Oddly enough we got a lot of people who didn't have jobs who came in to use the internet to look for work and to check on resumes and such. I remember back during Blogjune 2011 I met a guy who'd told me that a librarian had saved his life by helping him to find work through the libraries webservices. She'd shown him how to use all the websites and other assorted things which helped set him on track.
I started writing today with the thought that we're ignoring these people by accident but I've had an idea that we might be ignoring these people on purpose, mostly because they're the people who least need the services of the library so we don't bother trying to get them in the door. Is it better to save the time and effort on appealing to people who aren't likely to want to show up anyway and putting that capital towards programs which can help those who will?
Or are we just presuming too much about who is willing to come to a library and do stuff and are thus ignoring a solid potential market?
A part of me thinks that the latter is the case, libraries offer ample opportunities for those in the community to meet and talk about things. Book clubs for grown ups have proven popular in some libraries over the last few years, I'm a member of a writing club based in my local library(and joined entirely because a woman I met on a bus got talking with me about how much she enjoyed it, I didn't know about it at all), libraries are now being built with meeting rooms for the public so that we can host events either by the library or hire out the space for private functions. I think that there is a market here which we aren't taking advantage of right now. But I'm not sure what the best way to get it done is.
I think that a good idea would be to emulate book stores and their promotional events, things like author nights might work to get some people into the library who wouldn't otherwise go, the need to use social media to promote some of these things(given the budget issues I already bought up) would require some work as well. I was thinking that with most of the library meeting rooms I've seen having TV Projectors it could be possible to have sports afternoons with live broadcasts of big games for parents to take their kids to where they won't have to worry about alcohol and potential violence but still have a community atmosphere(the upcoming World Cup for example although with the time difference I don't think any games will be held at a good time, 8am, 2am and 2am but the idea holds for other sports maybe after the library is shut for noise reasons). Similarly movie nights, although the movie in the parks which the city does in Brisbane tend to attract more people than could easily fit into a library meeting room, even the big ones.
I'd love to hear, over twitter, what anyone else has to think about this topic. Because as I've said many times before, I'm not an expert in libraries and I'm still not employed at one so I might be missing out on something obvious which libraries have been doing for years that I've somehow missed.
My Day.
I should have gone to work today but I was still feeling a bit crook so I skipped it, I'll be back at full capacity next week I hope, I'm really regretting not going in today right now because by about midday I was feeling really fantastic but I'd already kind of set my afternoon aside and made plans to do things.
I had a Kebab for lunch and settled down to do some reading of the Divine Comedy at my brothers house before I made some Pumpkin soup, which unlike my usual pumpkin soup was actually not bad this time. I think it was because I had it on the stove for almost five hours before I served it up. I usually only have it on for about two hours and it's usually pretty lumpy, this time I got everything just right. I didn't have any guests over for dinner tonight, I tried to get a guy who used to live next door to my brother but he's coming in two weeks time I think(I need to check that actually now that I think of it), I'm thinking of asking my friend who is a keen cyclist to come over.
My brother went to bed pretty late tonight so I'm hoping he'll sleep in tomorrow. I'm hoping that I'll be back at 100% and able to work by Friday, I'm already feeling pretty much over whatever hellish cold I did have.
My dad was meant to get the dogs vaccinated today but wouldn't do it because they refused to give him a bill to pay later(he wanted my mum to pay it because they're her dogs even though he has to look after them) so now I have to email her on her holiday and work it out somehow. I have no idea how I became the middleman in this mess but here I am.
YouTube Video of the Day.
These two girls just love Doctor Who so much.
Click to view