Advocacy is something I have been wary about, working as I have for my entire library career, as part of ‘the public face of the council’. There is a general awareness that as such we are politically unbiased, and it is stated within policy that we cannot criticise the part of the public sector to which we belong. However, there is more to advocacy than the highly politicised library cuts / use of volunteers debates, and the Twitter chat on Sunday brought all of these threads of advocacy together. While some I ruled out for the reason of being unbiased as a council employee, there is always the ‘blowing our own trumpets’ option! While we are often thanked for our efforts by individuals, this is often as far as the good news gets (while complaints by contrast are often escalated to senior management level) and I certainly must begin to report our victories and the thanks given by grateful customers, to those wielding the power.
As a side note, the council social media policy states that photographs taken within the workplace are not to be used within our own personal social media accounts, and so advocating for the work that we do within our own libraries personally becomes slightly harder as the distance between professional and personal is maintained. For example, I have been taking photographs of displays within our library, however I believe that it would go against our social media policy if I were to post them on instagram, despite the fact that this would essentially be promotion for our library. For thi reason I do not share any of our library events on Facebook, or re-tweet them on Twitter. This can affect networking too as so far I have been reluctant to state which council I work for online, with the exception of the CILIP website.
Thinking in terms of campaigns, the only one with which our library has been involved is National Libraries Day, and we have come up against the usual battle of reaching a new audience. We love our regular customers, and they often come and express their support (telling us that they’re borrowing extra books to keep us going, offering donations etc) throughout the year, and especially on National Libraries Day, however there is always the niggle that we would like to increase the number of library regulars! In preparation for next year’s National Libraries Day, I am going to have a good look at CILIP’s Impact Toolkit. I have read about this within the write ups of this year’s CILIP conference; however I have yet to use it for myself. This looks as though it would be a brilliant next step following my chartership.
“The very act of completing this course, putting yourself out there on the open forum that is the world wide web and shouting about all that you love about libraries is an act of advocacy. Collaborating, networking and developing partnerships on Twitter or LinkedIn, or whatever has become your preferred network, strengthens our profession and allows us the opportunity to shout even louder for libraries.”
This is such a positive statement from Niamh on the Rudai23 blog. I had been increasing my online activity around libraries to keep myself better informed, and to gain an insight into the perspective of other library professionals. However this larger outcome of having an online presence and network further highlights the importance of visibility. It’s another opportunity to show people what we do and how well we do it.
I thoroughly enjoyed the Rudai23 chat, though I was glad though to have ‘lurked’ at the previous UKLibChat, as this had introduced me to Tweetdeck, it made following the conversation much, much easier.
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