Last year, I wrote about how you can use conditional formatting in Excel to track important deadlines for promoting library programs. In order to ensure that I remember to send something out to the more than 14 communication channels that we routinely utilize at the William H. Hannon Library, these customized spreadsheets have been indispensable.
As an academic institution on the semester system, Banned Books Week tends to be the first big, multi-day event of the programming cycle for the staff at the William H. Hannon Library at Loyola Marymount University. Outside of First-Year Orientation, this is one of our first opportunities to make an impression on our students.
The William H. Hannon Library hosts over 40 programs every year. Like many colleges and universities, Loyola Marymount University has multiple public calendars, bulletin boards and online spaces where students, faculty and staff go to find information about upcoming events. To rise above the surfeit of campus programming options for our users, it's important to make sure each space is populated with library programming information in a timely fashion.
Ursula Le Guin, in her meditation on the power of speech, says, "Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it."
What do you do after a library event ends? After the guests have gone away, after the feedback forms have been collected, after the monitors have been shut down, the food carried away, the books re-shelved, and the chairs stacked in the corner ... what's next?
This post was co-written by Rachel Deras, Librarian-in-Residence at Loyola Marymount University, and John Jackson.
This post is a summary of a talk that was recently presented at the Library Marketing and Communications Conference on Nov. 17, 2016.
At the William H. Hannon Library at Loyola Marymount University, library programming is supported by two full-time librarians, one full-time support staff person, and a team of student assistants. This is a far cry from where we were only a few years ago, when programming and outreach was led by a single librarian.*
