Community outreach for libraries
is vital. It communicates
the library’s importance to both users and nonusers and can
educate people to all the varied services that libraries now provide. Many
patrons still think that libraries are merely “book warehouses” and
are not aware of the DVDs available for checkout, the computers available
for use by the public, and the after-school programs that many libraries
strive to provide. Community outreach also provides information
to decision-makers, including local city councils, school administrators,
and library boards, about how vital the library’s mission is
to the community it serves.
Community outreach for libraries can take
many different forms. Every
front-line library worker has had the experience of being stopped
in a grocery store or the post office by a patron anxious about renewing
their library books. That’s as much outreach as anything
else, even if it is slightly unpredictable!
Outreach can also take the more “normal” paths, such
as talking to service groups, providing after-school programming,
and computer classes for seniors. Recently, the Mattoon Public
Library was fortunate enough to have received a LSTA grant (in conjunction
with the Media Center at the Mattoon Middle School) that allowed us
to place depository libraries in daycares, parochial schools, and
nursing homes. The staff of the libraries then did visits to
the agencies to talk to their clientele about the many things that
libraries make available to the community.
We received a positive response back from
the community, both from people who benefited from the grant and
from people who merely saw the benefits to those people we were
able to touch. One director
of an alternative school told us how important the outreach was – her
kids often felt uncared for, like the adults had forgotten them. The
fact that adults cared enough to give them books and to come and talk
to them mattered. Our circulation has not demonstrably increased
at either agency due to the grant, but the community’s goodwill
did.
Obviously, that project was costly and not
able to be replicated without a grant. Still, librarians need to think outside the
box when it comes to community outreach. It isn’t enough
to expect people to come through our doors any more – there’s
a lot of competition from the Internet, big-box bookstores, and busy
lifestyles. Librarians need to create opportunities to meet
their customers on their home-grounds and expand their vision of
the local library and diversity of options available to them at the
library.
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