Some thoughts on "branding" your library...

As I wrote in a recent post, I was privileged to attend the Texas Library Association's Annual Conference this year. One of the sessions that I attended was entitled Running Your High School Library Like a Business. I found the speaker made some excellent points, and one of the things about which he spoke was "branding." I had heard of this before, and not really listened, but this time, I tuned in. After I returned to school, I was met with this term again in a post by Joyce Valenza about the Unquiet Library. As is my wont, I have been thinking about this now for a couple of weeks. I decided to gather some additional information, and was not surprised to find that I am woefully behind in talking about this aspect of library marketing. I found a very helpful bibliography, and decided to read further. There is too much here to discuss in one post, but I am beginning to think seriously about incorporating this bit of thinking into the library program in my school. Some good advice from a March 2007 article in Libary Media Connection entitled, "Is Your Fish Dead?," informs me that a good place to start is with my mission statement. If any of you are readers of Regina, you know that my first few posts dealt with examining purpose. The mission statement that I ended up using for the WHS library is... Building a Learning Community. Here are my brainstormed ideas so far for a brand:

Learning Lab

Learning Wolverines

LibLearning

LearnLib

KnowLib

WLC (wolverine learning community)

learning place

THE third place

As you can see, I am not very good at this. More thought is going to be required.

Next post--the three Cs. Customers, Competition, and Change. Are we dealing with customers or patrons? Why?