Programming is the ultimate time balancing act. How do you do it all? If you’re like me, it’s a mix of very carefully planning and plunging wildly headfirst into your to-do list. Both require a level of organization that you have to consistently keep up with. Bullet journaling is my personal pie-in-the-sky of organization; however, I find it requires too much of a time commitment to do it exactly how I'd like to.
This month, I’ve handed the spotlight to a dear friend who always knows what obscure holiday it may be and how to celebrate it! Kami Bumgardner is the youth services coordinator at Maitland Public Library in Maitland, Fla., and works primarily with toddlers and kids through fifth grade. Any questions or comments will be forwarded to her. Enjoy!
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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.
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.
There are plenty of reasons for libraries to collaborate. Partnering with other organizations and people increases your resources, increases your reach, promotes creativity, models teamwork for others, and helps your community work toward common goals. Lest we forget, libraries have a lot to offer our partners, too; we are trusted, well situated for exposure and usually pretty competent in marketing our programs and services.
Ever wonder how other librarians come up with such creative program ideas? So do we! It’s not easy to keep library programming fresh, but these tips can help you find inspiration.
Do you have other favorite spots where you look for ideas? Share them in the comments.
From September 2017 to June 2018, the Palos Verdes Library District partnered with 12 local organizations to offer 36 programs on health, wellness, financial security, self-care and more for adults ages 55 and older. It was a complicated initiative with many moving pieces, and it was a new endeavor for nearly everyone involved.
It also took an incredible amount of planning. Before embarking on any program planning (including writing a grant proposal), you need to decide what that program is going to be, right?
How do you do that? A needs assessment!
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?
We all have our favorite places to search for new programming ideas. Here are a few of my favorite places to get new inspiration (besides, of course, Programming Librarian).
PLA’s Project Outcome is a free online toolkit designed to help public libraries understand and share the impact of their programs and services by providing simple, standardized surveys and an easy-to-use process for measuring and analyzing outcomes.
