Information Outlook, Vol. 6, No. 11, November 2002
Building a Message: A Small Colorado Group Helps Librarians Branch Out
By Leslie Shaver
Leslie Shaver is editor of Information Outlook magazine.
Getting the Word Out
Many special librarians can learn from the story of Laurel Penwell, a public librarian. Penwell manages a small branch of the Durango Public Library in southwestern Colorado. But the branch, which serves Hesperus, a farm community outside of Durango, is "hidden" in the Fort Lewis Mesa Elementary School.
"If you didn't have a kid in school, you didn't know there was a public library in there," Penwell said. "We needed to figure out how to get those members of the community who didn't have kids in school involved in the library."
Drawing townsfolk from this tiny community into the library took some creative marketing, but Penwell was up to the challenge. She began by looking for a place where she could tell community members about the library.
"The one place in the community that was close to the school was this little country store," she said. Penwell asked the owner if she could use the store to help promote her library. The owner said yes, and Penwell established a satellite library at the store, with a display of about 30 books and a stack of library card applications. When customers entered the store, Penwell would ask them questions designed to gauge their knowledge of the library.
How did Penwell think of using the store to promote her library? The exercise was actually a project for her library marketing class with the Colorado Library Marketing Council (CLMC). Since its inception 10 years ago, the CLMC has used seminars and Web courses to help more than 500 Colorado librarians develop, hone, or completely revamp their marketing strategies.
The council grew out of the 1990 Colorado Governor's Conference on Library and Information Services, which was a precursor to the 1991 White House Conference on Library and Information Services. Two delegates, SLA members Dorothy Norbie and Christine Hamilton-Pennell, attended the conference hoping that the pressing need they saw for library marketing would be recognized.
"We pushed for a platform plank on library marketing, but it was not supported," Hamilton-Pennell said. "In a follow-up meeting in 1991, we continued to press our case and were commissioned to start a committee to look at library marketing issues in Colorado. We decided to call the committee the Colorado Library Marketing Council."
The duo's first goal was to obtain support for their project from all five major library associations in Colorado (medical, legal, special, school, and academic). After getting both verbal and monetary support from all five in early 1992, they were ready to tackle bigger issues.
"We began by looking at what we needed to do to get librarians in Colorado more aware of marketing issues," Hamilton-Pennell said. "It was clear to us that most librarians had never applied proactive, user-defined, service-oriented principles to library services. Most librarians don't understand how to use marketing principles in their own institutions. We wanted to address that need."
Their first opportunity to address this came later in 1992, when CLMC delivered a workshop called "Marketing Your Library." The workshop, keynoted by long-time SLA member Kaycee Hale and sponsored by LexisNexis, drew more than 200 librarians from all types of libraries. It covered everything from marketing and public relations to identifying clients and developing a marketing plan.
In post-workshop surveys, Hamilton-Pennell and Norbie noticed that the marketing and public relations portion of the seminar generated the greatest interest among attendees. This led to a follow-up seminar titled "Getting Your Message Across: The Public Relations of Marketing." The event featured 10 speakers and drew a large crowd.
Their third project was the "Redefining Librarianship" institute in 1995. This program, delivered through the American Library Association's Library Administration and Management Association (LAMA) shifted the focus from marketing and public relations to the librarians themselves.
The Next Big Step
The "Redefining Librarianship" institute gave the CLMC organizers a chance to look deeper into the profession, and this search uncovered some surprisingly negative attitudes among librarians.
"We discovered that the problem was really among the people in the profession itself," Hamilton-Pennell said. "We kept hearing people say about their managers or clients, 'They don't understand what we do' or 'They don't appreciate us' or 'We don't ever get the budget we need.'" Instead of looking outside for answers, CLMC wanted to encourage librarians to look inside for solutions and to accept responsibility for improving their own situation.
CLMC decided to address this need by creating a two-part seminar, "Creating Change in Challenging Times: Marketing Tools for Library and Information Specialists." This seminar was produced as a pilot project in the fall of 1997 and involved 25 school library media specialists. Keith Lance of the Colorado State Library's Library Research Service developed a rigorous evaluation component to test the effectiveness of the course. Participants completed a pre-test, post-test, and six-month follow-up survey. The course consisted of two main parts:
1. Presentations on locus of control and marketing research tools: Librarians learned how to develop effective self-management, do market research, and develop and implement a market research project. Before their next meeting (six weeks later), they were expected to use these skills by conducting a small market research project. The goal of the project was to increase their confidence and skill levels by putting their newly learned marketing and customer service lessons into practice.
2. When the students gathered six weeks later, they were expected to report on their projects to their colleagues. The class offered feedback on each project.
Course teachers were Pat Wagner, a trainer who specializes in library marketing and public relations, and Claudine Paris, a corporate communications consultant who had developed a course on self-management.
The evaluation results showed that the course was successful in reaching its goals. The CLMC then applied for and received a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant to offer the course four more times in various locations throughout Colorado. During 1998 and 1999, the course was delivered to almost 100 school, public, academic, and special librarians across the state. The group also produced the seminar as an online course, which was offered four times in 2000 and 2001.
"There was definitely a change in people's awareness of marketing and locus of control as a result of taking this class," Hamilton-Pennell said. "Students became more data driven and more customer driven."
By exploring user needs, Hamilton-Pennell hopes CLMC students will discover the essence of marketing. "What we're trying to do is not have people just promote their library," she said. "We want you to find out who your customers are, what they need, and when and how they need it. If you don't ask those questions, you can become irrelevant. We want you to figure out where your target market is, then position yourself, develop a plan, and promote it."
Following the Blueprint
While libraries look for ways to meet the needs of their users, the CLMC continues to seek ways to meet the needs of librarians. The council's upcoming offering, which will address needs assessment and marketing for diverse communities, suggested itself as a result of an examination of Colorado's changing demographics. "We realized that Colorado is becoming more diverse but librarians are not," Hamilton-Pennell said.
This workshop is the only future project that is set in stone, and Hamilton-Pennell wouldn't have it any other way. "I think being flexible is very important," she said. "It's about looking at your customers and what they need."
The flexibility of the organization is at least partly fostered by its leadership structure: It is an all-volunteer group that currently includes 12 members from nine associations and library advisory groups in Colorado. "It's basically just a group of us that gets together and brainstorms," she said. The fact that we're ad hoc and have never had a real organizational structure has given us free rein to come up with what whatever we want to."
But the group does not operate haphazardly. There is always a chair (or co-chairs) to convene meetings. These chairs have represented special, legal, medical, and public libraries and have included SLA members Mark Estes, Wanda McDavid, Norbie, and Hamilton-Pennell. The current chair, Marti Cox, worked for many years in the advertising field before becoming a librarian.
Funding for the early projects was provided by the supporting library associations and a major sponsorship from Mead Data Central (now LexisNexis), as well as several other library vendors and Colorado's regional library systems. The attendance at the early sessions supplied income for even more educational opportunities, and the LSTA grant provided capital to start a website (www.clmc.org) and develop the online course. With these sources of income and the money earned from exporting "Creating Change in Challenging Times" to the North Suburban Illinois School District, CLMC continues to run a positive balance. 
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