TL;DR Advocacy – Pop Up Library

We know that you are doing amazing things in your library and community and we want to hear about it! TL;DR is a fancy way of saying “Too Long;Didn’t Read” because no one has time to read every single detail of your life.

Tell us your advocacy story in 149 words or less and we’ll put it up for the world to see. This is a great opportunity to refine your next elevator pitch, and to inspire others to step up their advocacy game.

Today’s Boots on the Ground post comes from Shawna Lomonaco. She is a Youth and Fmaily Services Library Assistant II for a small library system in Virginia. She’s passionate about early literacy, hates giving other adults hugs (except on birthdays), and has a preteen at home who takes more pictures than the paparazzi.

Shawna and her fabulous British coworker Tom at a recent Pop Up Library

Our city has a small population, but is the largest in our area in terms of land. With only three branches, this has presented a challenge in meeting all of our community’s needs.  Something wonderful we have started this year is a Pop-Up Library.

Our Pop-Up Library is exactly how it sounds. We pack a mini library and “Pop-Up” throughout the community. We stuff our van with books, tables, chairs, laptop, Ipad, and activities for children including chalk and bubbles. We set up at different scheduled locations, such as farmer’s markets, festivals, and even grocery stores.

Our target audience is anyone and everyone! This has proven to be a great way to reach our rural areas. I enjoy seeing children get excited about the library, but what I really love about our Pop-Up Library is that it reminds adults that we still exist and are as awesome as ever!

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Advocacy Toolbox – Everyday Advocacy

Is everyone ready to add to their Advocacy Toolbox? Your tools should help you advocate for yourself, your library, or simply increase your knowledge on a topic. This one should definitely go to the top of your toolbox.

Have you all been to this website? GO IMMEDIATELY! Right now.

The site Everyday Advocacy is an initiative from the Association for Library Service to Children all about advocacy! It started a year ago and the amount of resources on the site is outrageous. This initiative was started to help youth librarians be more informed about advocacy and its potential in their profession.

If you’re looking to become more involved in advocacy and you’re just not sure where to start then this website is made for you. It explains the different types of advocacy, how you can realistically become an advocate, and gives some really great information about how to best share your message. There’s even a whole page dedicated to using statistics effectively! 

Check out this website if you’re looking for extremely useful advice, or if you are simply trying become more familiar with advocacy in general.

Advocacy Toolbox – Bringing Books to Life

Welcome to the first “Advocacy Toolbox” post. There are amazing things happening right now in the land of research and advocacy. We know it can be hard to keep up with everything though!

These posts will highlight an item to add to your own advocacy toolbox. Your tools should help you advocate for yourself, your library, or simply increase your knowledge of a topic. If you want more detailed information about the topic just click through to the linked article.

Bringing Books to Life
By Jamie Chamberlin
Monitor Staff
October 2012, Vol 43, No. 9
Print version: page 40

5 things to take away from this article

 

• Simply reading text on a page is not enough to support early literacy.
• Readers must show enthusiasm and ask open-ended questions for children to gain skills.
• Parents and teachers often need coaching about how to ask questions as they read to a group.
• Selecting a developmentally appropriate title is hard! Parents and teachers need help
• When teachers asked open-ended questions and focused on describing how words related to the child’s life, the children’s vocabulary grew more than when a teacher simply read a book.

So what does this mean for you? All of the “strategies” they are teaching the parents and teachers are things we do in storytime! We model for our parents and show them great books every week. This is a great article to share with managers, directors, or coworkers who don’t quite understand why storytimes are so important to a community.

 

 

TL;DR Advocacy – Library Sneakers

Welcome to the first ever Storytime Underground “TL;DR Advocacy” post. We know that you are doing amazing things in your library and community. We want to know about it but no one has time to read every single detail of your life. TL;DR is a fancy way of saying “Too Long;Didn’t Read”.

Tell us your advocacy story in 149 words or less and we’ll put it up for the world to see. This is a great opportunity to refine your next elevator pitch, and to inspire others to step up their advocacy game. It can be a huge movement (Storytime Underground) or something small (the post below), we want to hear them all!

Today’s Boots on the Ground post comes from Brooke Rasche, who is a joint chief of Storytime Underground and works at La Crosse Public Library. 

This winter, our library began providing a field trip adventure for kindergartners. 
We call them our Library Sneakers!

While we are talking to the children we stress that this is THEIR library. We tell them throughout the tour how we want them to visit us often, because this is their library and they share it with the entire community. We provide an incentive for them to return by offering a tote bag for their first visit back.

The best results we have seen from these tours are the parents that come into the library with their children for the first time. They usually say, “She’s been talking about the library since she came on the tour and said we HAD to come this week.” By empowering our kindergartners to be advocates for the library, they are passing the message on to their adults in a way we never could!