Much of the mainstream media coverage concerning libraries these days is focused on the challenges they face, escalating budget cuts, and questions about their relevance in today’s world. Library resource vendor Gale, part of Cengage Learning, wants to help turn those perceptions around and show libraries in a more positive light. On September 30 Gale launched My Library Story (MLS), an online community where people can share the many different ways libraries have changed and enriched their lives. Library users and staff, teachers, and parents are encouraged to submit stories about what libraries mean to them, which are then published on the MLS website along with photos and videos. For every story submitted through February 28, 2015, Gale will donate $1 to an advertising fund that will be used to promote libraries during National Library Week 2015. According to Frank Menchaca, Gale senior vice president, the idea for MLS came about through conversations with the people buying and using Gale products over the years. “We’re always getting these amazing stories from customers,” he told LJ. “If we’re talking about a product, the first conversation we have is about how it’s going to solve a real problem in a way the library can demonstrate to its constituents.”

MAKING USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

The initiative is one of a number aimed at reaching a broad audience with a grassroots positive message about libraries. OCLC piloted Geek the Library, one of the earliest social media library campaigns, in 2009. Since then many crowdsourced initiatives have encouraged library supporters to make use of social media platforms, most recently New York Public Library’s #ireadeverywhere, OverDrive’s Read an Ebook Day, or LJ’s own #howilibrary. All incorporate personal expressions in one form or another, whether through photos, tweets, or blog posts. Because they rely on public participation, with a minimum of marketing outlay from the institutions that sponsor them, marketers and library advocates consider them an effective—and efficient—way to promote the cause. In order to feature longer stories, MLS uses a Wordpress blog format; posts range from under a hundred words to several paragraphs in length. Each is submitted through the MLS interface, which collects contributors’ contact information; the library’s name, city, and state; and the type of library being described. Contributors can also upload photos or videos, or use preselected images to accompany their stories. Submissions are reviewed by Gale staff to make sure they’re appropriate and correct any typographical errors, but otherwise the words are the the authors’ own. Comments are also enabled, in order to further the conversation. Within MLS’s first week library fans had contributed 117 stories, the site had 11,000 views, and the accompanying video had been watched more than 1,200 times. Menchaca feels that the call for library stories has hit a nerve with the public, and is both surprised and pleased at how personal many of them are. “If you look at the testimonials, they’re really lengthy,” he told LJ, “not just ‘I think my library’s a great place to go.’ If you dive into some of these stories, they’re really [about] life changing [events].”

A WIDE RANGE OF STORIES

Stories run the gamut from serious to amusing. Taken together, they paint an effective portrait of the many ways libraries touch people’s lives. Carol S. tells of her father, a high school dropout, who credited the Detroit Public Library with giving him the education he needed to be enroll in law school in his 30s—scoring in the 99th percentile on his entrance exam. Christe H., of Texas, describes how her community came together to help restore their local school library after a fire. And Kevin D. remembers an eighth-grade visit to the archivist at the Niagara Falls, NY, Public Library as “like asking to see The Mighty Oz. I was led by a massive, uniformed guard up the winding red stairs, past many red-ropes to where he sat, old, bespectacled, kindly. He produced maps, ledgers, blueprints of bridges… then pulled out at least a half-dozen different Niagara Falls newspapers.” (Kevin got an A+ on the paper he wrote.) What the stories all have in common, Menchaca told LJ, is that “they drive home the understanding that one or two really positive experiences in a library changes the way people think about learning.” There is a preponderance of contributions from Gale’s home state of Michigan; the company’s employees are clearly lovers of libraries themselves. Menchaca would agree: “If you were to tap the product people and the sales and marketing people to ask them what’s important about what Gale does, they’d all answer in the same way.” As for the site’s future beyond February 2015, Harmony Faust, Gale’s marketing director for public libraries, told LJ: “we plan on having the community live on in perpetuity at this point…using [and] sharing the stories in promotions of libraries.”