Fundraisers and fundraising ideas

Library fundraisers can bring in a wide variety of people from the community and can be a lot of fun, too. The community of Ester uses music, food, sports, and various contests to engage people. The John Trigg Ester Library has three fundraisers a year: the Book Bash & Lallapalooza (an auction with entertainment and a lasagne feed), the Li-Berry Music Festival and Pie Throwdown (a music festival and pie-baking contest), and Readers on the Run (a 5-kilometer footrace with costume contest and stops to create magnetic poetry for the poetry contest).

The Li-Berry Music Festival this year will be September 13, from 3-9:30 pm (or later) at the Golden Eagle Saloon and Hartung Hall, in the village of Ester. Pies are due at the Eagle between 12 and 3 and must include wild Alaska berries, but can be savory or sweet. (See our contest rules for more information or e-mail the JTEL librarians.)

For our 2010 spring fundraiser, the Lallapalooza, we are going to have for the first time a Library Decathlon: ten sporting events playing on stereotypes and actual duties of librarians. So far the list includes tests of skill such as a Ruler Thwack, a Shushing event, a Book Stack Carry and Alphabetize Relay Race, a Book Cart Costume & Choreography Contest (on the order of the drill team event in Chicago), and a Book Thief Tackle event. Teams from around the state will be invited, and librarians in particular are encouraged to participate, although the general public can try their library skills also.

So tell us—what sorts of fun things do you do for fundraisers?

Singles are people too!

In some churches, there's a joke regarding children who come for their children, that you have about 12 years to get them hooked. In the past, libraries were places for the elite, and children were not served at all. Now, though, I think that the same joke could be used in some public libraries. We bring them in with story hours and craft projects, and hope they'll stay when their tastes move from chapter books to novels and how-to manuals.

Library Hotline (from Dec. 8, 2008, but we won't talk about how behind I am on my reading) highlighted a new campaign of the Chicago Public Library, geared towards single people aged 25-35 with no children:

Centered around the phrase, "Not What You Think," followed by the tag line, "It's Free. It's Easy," the campaign seeks to remind this group how much has changed at the library.

Are you reaching young(ish), single adults in your community? What are you doing that works? Any simple ideas of how to include this group?

What can you do on *your* library's website?

In a post titled Doing Stuff at the Library’s Website, library blogger David Lee King asks:

Here’s something to ponder, next time you’re looking for something to ponder. What can you actually DO at your website? Can you do most of the the real “stuff” that your library offers as activities?

He then lists the types of things that you can do if you walk into your physical library:

• check out a book
• read a book or magazine
• take notes and do research
• put a public PC on reserve for later
• pester the reference librarian with questions
• check stuff out when I’m done
• attend a training session or a fun program

Without making judgments about whether patrons should be able to do all of the above, I thought it would be fun if us Alaskan librarians shared what is possible to do on our websites. So, please consider copying and pasting the list above into a comment and let us know each of the things a patron can do on your website. For each thing that can be done, list where.

I'll get the ball rolling with an unofficial assessment of what you can do at the Alaska State Library's website at http://library.state.ak.us:

• check out a book - Only if it is an audio book. Cardholders can do that at http://listenalaska.lib.overdrive.com/.
• read a book or magazine - They can read magazines by visiting our journal finder tool at http://atoz.ebsco.com/home.asp?Id=K09408 and either browse the title lists or type in the name of a specific magazine or journal. They can read SOME (state-published) books by visiting our State Publications shipping lists at http://www.library.state.ak.us/asp/shippinglists/shippinglists.html or by searching our catalog for e-books (mostly older Netlibrary titles).
• take notes and do research - Patrons can't take notes on our website, but they can do research - either by visiting our databases page at http://library.state.ak.us/index/index.html OR by going to our new division page at http://lam.alaska.gov and using the search box which pulls up content from web pages at the State Archives and State Museum as well as the State Library. Type in "governor egan" without quotes for an example.
• put a public PC on reserve for later - our patrons can't do this in person.
• pester the reference librarian with questions - We wouldn't call it pestering, but they can get an Ask-A-Librarian e-mail form by visiting http://library.state.ak.us/forms/askalibrarian.cfm.
• check stuff out when I’m done - Only audio books as noted above.
• attend a training session or a fun program - Not yet, but we're working on it. More in the next few months.

That's what you can do by visiting the web site of the State Library. What can you do on yours? If there's something you can do that's not listed above, let us know.

Keynote: Communities and Communication in a Social and Mobile World

I really enjoyed this keynote by author Howard Rheingold, who wrote Smart Mobs. The themes were of trust and communication over time. Rheingold noted that when he had written other books, he researched them, wrote them, and then put the topic away, but this topic has stuck with him. His presentation was lively, interesting and relevant, with visuals reminiscent of Flat Stanley or Where's Waldo. I've stuck pretty closely with my notes from his presentation:

Cell phones are changing the way the world looks at time, children, and each other. In Finland, the word for cell phone is the diminutive of “hand.” In Tokyo, people were walking around looking at their cell phones instead of around themselves or at each other. Rheingold heard the saying, “kids flock like birds” and noticed a softening of time, where we don't meet at a pre-specified time as much, but rather plan to meet in the afternoon and work out the details of when and where later, on the phone. Protests, meetings, etc., have all been arranged by cell phone (for example: "everyone show up at this time in this place wearing black"), lowering the threshold for cooperation. Oh My News (Korea) tipped the election on election day via social networking, and there are many more examples of this type of thing from all over the world: high school kids in Chile, Basques in Madrid, violent radicals in Denmark, Nigeria, Australia, and more.

This isn't new. Way back when, hunter-gatherers needed protein every day. They gathered together in extended family groups and managed to drive all large mammals in North America to extinction more quickly. These were big, so hunters could provide for more than themselves and their families. Communication was key for hunting and sharing.

Later, big civilizations grew in the river deltas. Writing began from record-keeping: accountants started it all! Reading and writing was limited to the elite until the printing press. New forms of collective action emerged from new forms of communication. Science becomes collective intelligence instead of personal genius. Luther wasn’t the first priest to protest, just the first to protest after printed broadsides. There were similar advances in politics with the founding of this country. There were huge advances in banking and commerce because people could transmit currency with paper – keys are trust and worldwide communication system. This sharing allowed people to build on each other’s discoveries. Looking forward, we are on another cusp with toward near universal use of small communication/computer devices.

Markets are changing. Open source is growing out of self-interest. Opening proprietary source software, letting people use it, has been key to development, growth, and financial rewards. For example, Lilly created a market for solutions, like eBay. Amazon, Google and others have opened up their programming interfaces and ads to let others make a little money and them make a lot of money. Getting people working on problems across firms and fields has been huge and successful. Prisoner’s dilemma stopped trading with unknowns, but eBay helped increase trust with seller information and power sellers. The internet is allowing us to communicate and share, which is allowing development that never could have happened otherwise, for example: Wikipedia, ThinkCycle (cooperative design for developing world), Swarm Supercomputing Collectives (SETI @ home, Folding @ home, and more), Amazon Mechanical Turk (crowd-sourcing), Cocreation of culture (p2p and many to many) blogs, YouTube, and more. Success comes to those who provide powerful platforms that enable individuals. This is leveraged self-interest. It looks like altruism but enables their self-interest to help others.

We are in a multimedia world, with technology as mind amplifiers, used by people who never used to use computers. From small subcultures to large portions of population, people are, well, participating in participatory media…blogs, wikis, rss, mashups, podcasts, file sharing, tagging, and more. We have broader, faster, cheaper, social communication. We need to take risks with experimentation! Most learning is happening when the teacher isn’t looking, on evening and weekends, in the back of the class. Learning is self-guided, but needs more guidance from others, especially in how to apply skills. Librarians can help. There is a social media classroom available: http://socialmediaclassroom.com, a combination blog, wiki, forums, chat, social bookmarking, how-to and more, which we can use to help people figure out what’s appropriate for their use, and the appropriate rhetoric to use there. This is currently available as a free Drupal download, but will soon be available in a hosted IT-Free version for educators, including libraries.

This is not all just fun. Social media can be used to make the world work better (when Rheingold couldn't get Comcast to respond to an emergency repair request, he got quick help by contacting Comcastcares on Twitter, and wikis and blogs have been effectively used to coordinate worldwide emergency response, as in http://cooperationcommons.com). However, in this rapidly changing world, we need to keep up with the literacies, not the technologies. In searching: how do you get an answer, but also, how do you know the answers are true? This is key for librarians. We can help with the information literacy piece!

Are you being killed by Kindness?

The May 2008 issue of American Library features an article called Killed by Kindness by Julia Keller, cultural critic of the Chicago Tribune.

Ms Keller says we should beware of people quoting Jorge Luis Borges saying "I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library." In her words, "Paradise is a place to which you aspire, not a place to which you make frequent visits or insist that your tax dollars be directed."

As for the people who express love for libraries in nostalgic terms:

Everybody loves them; in fact, they're loving them to death, especially in our schools. Libraries are routinely discussed in warm and reverent tones. Personal reminiscences with libraries as the centerpiece are earnest and heartfelt, set against a pastel wash of nostalgia. Most people have a favorite story about the library of their youth--the day they discovered, say, A Wrinkle in Time or Codes and Secret Writing--and they adore telling it, after which they sigh and offer a those-were-the-days shrug of bemused resignation. Yet these same people--the ones who rhapsodize about finishing off the entire Nancy Drew or Tom Swift oeuvre over the course of a single enchanted summer--often haven't stepped inside a real, live, functioning library in decades.

Do you feel your library is being loved to death? Do you think that libraries need all the support they can get, whether it is rooted in the present or past? How would you like to see libraries talked about?

-----------------
Cited Article:

Title: Killed by KINDNESS.
Authors: Keller, Julia
Source: American Libraries; May2008, Vol. 39 Issue 5, p50-51, 2p
Full Text via Digital Pipeline: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=31872790&site=ehost-live

What Treats do You Offer?

Have some pizza!
Originally uploaded by Lester Public Library

This picture is from the Lester Public Library in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. It's from a shelf-straightening party and I'm posting this Outside photo here because I've been to similar library functions in Juneau.

I imagine a lot of us draw upon our communities once in awhile for shelfreading or other library tasks that sometimes get lost in the shuffle of serving our patrons. When you have such occasions, what do you serve your volunteers? Or does the sight of fingerfoods in the library under any circumstances fill you with dread?