INFO 200 Blog #2: Outreach Library Professionals in Public Libraries (2024)

by Shoshanna Anthony, INFO 200, Fall 2023

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay (http:www.pixabay.com)

After decades of creating community events, birthday parties, children’s day camps, and being part of many public visual and performing art spectacles I found my way to our county library system in the position of Youth Services Outreach Coordinator. I had never heard of such a position and was excited to see that it encapsulated so many facets of what I love about working in the local community. My position is largely funded through a partnership with First 5 Humboldt, so I focus on helping our libraries provide welcoming environments for young families, developing programming, and doing outreach in underserved communities. Since becoming a member of this community in May of 2022 my mind has been alight with exciting ideas and I am delighted to use this project to delve deeper into the information community of public library professionals focused on outreach.

Though my outreach position is designed to lure families with young children to the library, I find myself engaged in general outreach on a regular basis. It has been witnessing the increase in circulation statistics, regular patron visits, and program attendance all around at our county public library system in the past year as outreach has resumed since the COVID-19 pandemic. As David Freas asserts in a July 2023 San Jose State University School of Information Career Blog interview, “Outreach is powerful. Though it may seem like outreach is an ancillary part of a library operation, just an in-person form of publicity, an engaged outreach program can drive a lot of interactions both outside and inside the library.” (Nguyen, 2023). I am interested to learn more about the community of library professionals that do this important outreach work, particularly when it connects to advancing the concepts of Early Literacy in their communities. It’s a community working to build community!

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Based on the concept of community as defined by Christen and Levinson in chapter four of Information Services Today (Fisher & Fulton, 2022), I believe outreach library professionals have instrumental and affinity-based membership to their community group. This community does not need to share proximate nor primordial bonds. They are primarily connected through participation in their profession, with their passion for their outreach goals hopefully shining through in all they do in their work as a shared affinity. Outreach library professionals share instrumental membership through their pursuit of their organizations’ mission and goals. Whether they are promoting library services and programs, creating programming, celebrating the value of literacy, or general advocacy, their enthusiasm for devising creative, effective ways to do their work connects them intrinsically. Their shared strategies at the intersections of behind-the-scenes library work, planning with partner organizations, and public engagement opportunities make them a community. People do this work across the country, and probably across the world! However, in my first year of library outreach I suspect it is common that there may only be one or few others in a similar role in any library, and I am just starting to learn where to connect with fellow outreach library staff beyond my immediate geography.

What does an Outreach Library Professional at a Public Library Do?

This category of library staff works to design, plan, implement, promote, document, and evaluate outreach plans to support the mission of the library and the goals for the specific outreach effort. In Building Community Engagement and Outreach in Libraries, Ippoliti references three types of library outreach presented by Farrel & Mastel in 2016: focused outreach, whole-person outreach, and just-for-fun outreach. (Ippoliti, 40-41) I would add a fourth type – general library outreach. While not as easy to evaluate, general outreach serves to increase visibility for the library system and overall presence in the community. General outreach may be especially helpful when participating in an event or partnering with a new organization to see what is most relevant for that situation to be emphasized in the future. Focused outreach will emphasize a specific outreach goal, such as library card sign-ups, early literacy and programs for families of young children, health and social service resources, job trainings, teen offerings, etc. Outreach for the Spanish-speaking community, for example, might include all sorts of programming available in that language.

How is Outreach different than Marketing?

While sometimes entangled or co-mingled, the goals and processes of outreach and marketing are actually very different. Both serve the mission of the organization and seek to enhance visibility and presence. However, “while marketing is about promoting specific services or products and is more unilateral in nature, engagement is about building lasting relationships.” (Ippoliti, p 34). Since these goals are different, library professionals engaged in outreach are distinct from those solely concerned with branding and visual presentation of the library and are a community of their own seeking to develop long-term relationships with their fellow library staff, other libraries, a diverse array of local/regional organizations and institutions, and the public-at-large.

How does the community of Outreach Library Professionals Connect?

Although outreach library professionals might basically perform similar types of functions at all types of libraries across the nation, there seem to frequently just one or a few working in outreach at each branch or library system. So how do they connect as a community? There seem to be three primary ways for this disparate community to connect: online professional association blogs / discussion threads, Facebook groups, and participation in professional association conferences. Through participation in these information grounds, public library outreach professionals can connect, and seek to nurture more tangible bonds of community that will make them feel more interconnected, supported, and successful in their roles.

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The most relevant online professional discussion threads / blogs I found with topics that focused on outreach and serving specific facets of this community were those on the American Library Association’s ALA Connect forum (https://connect.ala.org). There are two that particularly resonate with me connected in the Early & Family Literacy Committee) and in the Association for Library Service to Children (ASLC) blog. These are fairly active forums with dozens of comments on most threads posted to the group. For ALA Connect, the description invites participation by reminding members that it is a place where they can “engage with each other and grow their networks by sharing their own expertise and more!” (ALA Connect site). A drawback of these forums are that they are available only to ALA members, and I am unsure about how many libraries have institutional memberships and invite their staff to participate during their work days. On Facebook, the American Library Association page (https://www.facebook.com/AmericanLibraryAssociation) has 243K followers, and the Early Career Librarians group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/earlycareerlibrarians) has 2.9K members and an average of 9 posts a week. The Early Childhood Literacy group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1547299395523174) has 5.2K members and is even more active, and focuses on outreach and connections to community across a variety of fields with library staff interspersed with many other outreach professionals. The drawback here is that to participate you must have a Facebook account and also apply to join the private groups, which include a review process.

Each of these provide opportunities for sharing successes, addressing frustrations, seeking problem-solving, soliciting advice and answers, humor, and overall camaraderie. Virtual, hybrid, and in-person annual conferences organized by professional associations offer a chance for outreach professionals to find each other and connect on a personal level that will strengthen the community bonds across the year. The main ones seem to be the events produced by the American Library Association, the Public Library Association, and the Association for Rural and Small Libraries. There are are also many conferences at the state level. In California, there is an annual conference presented by the California Library Association. The work of outreach professionals and the field of outreach is very prominent in these conferences; in 2023 the ALA Annual Conference program schedule featured 59 conference events connected to the search word “outreach” (https://2023.alaannual.org). The drawback with participation in this extremely effective opportunity to building community and deepen professional bonds is the cost of the registration fee and the travel costs and time away from work (unless an institution has the budget to send their outreach staff).

American Library Association 2023 ALA Annual Conference

Characteristics of Outreach Library Professionals at Public Libraries as an Information Community

Connecting this exploration of what outreach library professionals do (and where they might find and interact with each other) with Durrance’s characteristics of Information Communities as presented in Information Communities (Fisher & Fulton, 2022), it seems as though there is ample opportunity for development and growth. The role of an outreach professional at a public library is dynamic and multi-faceted, and they seem to pursue their work largely independently within their own institutions and communities, so some of the characteristics feel shallow to me but have plenty of room for deeper connections and sense of community with each other. I was unable to find statistics on the number of outreach librarians and other outreach staff at public libraries (some of that failure could be due to the lack of consistent job titles, and that this role is sometimes done by MLIS librarians, and sometime by other staff members in part time and full-time positions). It would be interesting to compile research to determine how, if at all, outreach library staff feel connected to the broader professional community they are part of. At my county library system, I am the Youth Services Outreach Coordinator and there is a part time Latinx Spanish Language Outreach Coordinator for one area in the county. Aside from that, all library branch coordinators and one adult programming librarian are tasked with integrating outreach into their overall workloads. It would be difficult data to collect.

Observations based on this community and the five characteristics of information communities:

Emphasis on collaboration among diverse information providers
This seems like it would be most likely to happen in an active discussion in one of the Facebook groups, or directly with other participants at a conference. Of course, if a group of outreach staff were proximate and working on a project together this would be an essential part of their work together and would strengthen their sense of community.
Capacity to form around people’s needs to access and use information
I could see this as being a primary use of discussion board / blog threads as people pose questions and ask for resources and the community offers dialog and ideas. Facebook groups can also be useful in the same way. When specific questions or issues are brought up, people from a large range of experience levels and backgrounds are quick to offer feedback, opinions, and assistance. Links to resources are freely shared, and conversations can be continued through direct messages or in other ways at a personal level outside the public forum.
Capacity to exploit the information-sharing qualities of emerging technologies
As public library outreach staff are limited in number at most libraries and library systems, they are geographically scattered and most of their connections within the community will be in emerging technologies to create virtual forums and gathering places. As this group constantly tries to stay fluent with emerging technologies to best reach their target demographics they should be adept at using the same skills to connect and convene with each other!
Ability to transcend barriers to information sharing
From my experience so far within this field, I would expect that the biggest barrier to participation with the larger community of public library outreach professionals is a feeling of being overwhelmed and relatively isolated in the promotional and outreach efforts they are currently immersed in, so just remembering to take the time to nurture involvement with a broader community can be essential to feeling supported and to feel you have additional resources and support from others in the same field. The outreach workers working to connect library services to the broader community need outreach workers to connect them to each other within the field!
Capacity to foster social-connectedness
I believe this capacity is limited by the capacity of the individuals in the field. A member of this community needs to do a bit of searching and exploring to find and encounter opportunities to interact with those not in their immediate local circles. Again, it would be interesting to see a research survey done to determine how many there are in this field and, of these, how many connect professionally and/or socially with other library outreach staff as part of a broader community. The capacity is large, and I believe that if library outreach staff is able to attend a conference and be surrounded by the ideas and energy of their fellow community members it would lead to direct deepening of the social connectedness of the participants.

CLOSING THOUGHTS…

Overall, I find this information community to be interesting in that its members are connected by affinity and via the instrument of their profession and mission, but have few methods to connect directly with each other across the field without some effort and ambition. Outreach is a field that takes a large amount of behind-the-scenes preparation and on-the-stage presentation with enthusiasm and passion, but leaving space in their workdays to explore how to connect (and finding the time and energy to do so) with their fellow community of outreach professionals may be the biggest challenge. So far, I have found it to make the most sense to connect with local outreach professionals from other organizations that I interact with and participate alongside at community events regularly than seeking online forums and groups filled with the outreach community in my field. I am excited to be an outreach professional at my public library and feel more likely to delve in since exploring these ways to be a more significant part of this community for all the resources, support, problem-solving, humor, and camaraderie it can provide.

I hope that our national organizations recognize the importance of outreach professionals as the relevance and importance of libraries is being highlighted and accentuated in the midst of so much political turmoil. If attention was given to encourage and nurture the community of library outreach professionals in a comprehensive way that allowed them to directly find, use, and share toolbox resources that are NOT behind the pay wall of professional association fees or conference registrations it would be amazing. After searching, the best tool that I found was a wonderful one designed to connect families to library services entitled IDEABOOK: Libraries for Families, produced by the Harvard Family Research Project (Weiss et al, 2016). More easy tools and a simple way to feel membership in a broader community for those who fall into an outreach role without the title in our libraries would boost robust outreach in communities served and give a bountiful source of renewable energy in the bubbly enthusiasm of library outreach professionals who love to connect their incredible libraries with the broader public.

Image byHenning Westerkamp from Pixabay (http:www.pixabay.com)

REFERENCES

American Library Association. June 27, 2023. [Photo from ALA Annual Conference]. Facebook. Retrieved September 7, 2023, from https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=646391134191656&set=pb.100064623256339.-2207520000&type=3

Bates, M. (2018). Information behavior. In McDonald, J.D., & Levine-Clark, M. (Eds.),Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences(4th ed., Vol. 3, pp. 2074-2085). CRC Press.https://doi-org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/10.1081/E-ELIS4

Christensen, K. & Levinson, D. 2003. Encyclopedia of community: from the village to the virtual world. Sage Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412952583

Early Career Librarians (n.d.). Home [Facebook group]. Facebook. Retrieved September 7, 2023, from https://www.facebook.com/groups/earlycareerlibrarians

Early Childhood Literacy (n.d.). Home [Facebook group]. Facebook. Retrieved September 7, 2023, from https://www.facebook.com/groups/1547299395523174

Fisher, K. & Fulton, C. (2022). Information communities. In S. Hirsh (Ed.), Informationservices today: An introduction(pp. 41-52). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,Incorporated.

Fontenot, M. (2013). Five “typical” years as an outreach librarian: And five things I have learned. In College & Research Libraries News (Vol. 74, Issue 8, pp. 431-432). Association of College and Research Libraries. https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.74.8.8997

Ippoliti, C. (2022). Building a library outreach program through community engagement. In Crowe, K. & Hélouvry, J. (Ed.), Building community engagement and outreach in libraries (pp. 33-47). Emerald Publishing Limited.

Nguyen, H. (2023, July 7). What’s the best part about working outreach? Q&A with David Freas. San Jose State University School of Information Career Blog. https://ischool.sjsu.edu/career-blog/whats-best-part-about-working-outreach

Weiss, H., Caspe, M., Lopez, E., & McWilliams, L. (2016). IDEABOOK: Libraries for families. Global Family Research Project. https://globalfrp.org/Our-Work/Libraries