I will preface these thoughts by saying that I am a HUGE fan of podcasts. I recently listened to a podcast by a tech entrepreneur about solving big problems. One of his statements got to me. Read on…
For the past few years I have participated in NHLA’s Advocacy Committee with the goal of assisting our state’s public librarians on publicity campaigns and marketing ideas. Generally speaking, libraries do a terrific job of promoting themselves as a place to get a book, use the computers, entertain the kids, and shaping their communities. The Maker movement has also been very good for libraries; we have added a lot of new exciting and fun educational programming for kids and preteens.
However, I have always envisioned a large and unifying message to bring to the public, something that actually took into consideration all that we do (e.g. books, magazines, research, story time, maker, community, adult programming…). The problem is that we do a lot. Our campaign would look like: Read a Book or a Magazine or a Research Article and Learn Something New and Come to a Program and Bring Your Kids to Build a Robot. Well, you get my drift. We need something short and sweet that hits the mark.
So this brings me back to the talk about the millionaire tech entrepreneur. He implored the audience members to have intellectual curiosity. Think about that: Helping our community members to be intellectually curious is what we do. It is why we promote literacy with story times, show our patrons 3D printing, offer books and novels on a wide range of subjects, provide access to the internet, host speakers, etc.
Now, intellectual curiosity is not a new buzz term for public libraries. Any quick Google search will see that many prestigious libraries have used the term in their mission statements. But the more I rolled the phrase over and over in my mind, the more I liked it. Nearly everything we do as librarians could be promoted with this catch phrase.
