Shortly after I started working at Loyola Marymount University in fall 2015, I started writing regular posts for ALA’s Programming Librarian website. Between 2016-18, I wrote fifteen short articles for the site on topics that included social media, program development, exhibitions, external communications, and project management.
I had almost forgotten about these until recently when someone shared one in a Discord group and I realized that my byline on all the posts had been accidentally removed during the site’s latest redesign. It was a surreal moment where I said to myself, “Hey, that sounds like something I would write. Oh wait, I DID write that!” (Note: ALA was super great about getting my byline added back)
As much as I cringe to read my own writing, I do love seeing the early emergence of programs (like LMU Speaks, the Long Night Against Procrastination, and Banned Books Week) and processes that I still maintain to this day. The conditional formatting in Excel post featured a spreadsheet that I first developed in 2017, have greatly expanded and modified since, and still check daily to see what external communications need to happen this week.
At the time I wrote these posts, I was still new to the position; and “the outreach team” had not yet become an official library department. Not surprisingly, our procedures are more advanced and codified than they were in 2016 and exist on a foundation that is more than a decade in the making. So much so that recently I had the realization that were I to hire someone onto my team, they would (1) need to come with a few years of full time outreach and communications experience just to keep up but (2) would be plugging into a fully-built machine.
My team has as far to go as we have come (if not farther), but it’s nice too reflect upon the progress we have made to date. Here are all the posts, in chronological order:
- Collaborating with Galleries: A Blessed Match (2016, March 28)
- When Library Student Workers Take Over Instagram (2016, April 28)
- Curating and Cultivating Exhibitors (2016, May 26)
- Building on Millions of Tiny Shoulders: Tips for Hosting a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon (2016, July 2)
- Time to Meet Your New Faculty! (2016, August 2)
- Keeping It All Together with Trello: A Project Management Tool for Library Programming (2016, September 2)
- Subtle Nudges: Reminding Your Audience about Upcoming Events (2016, October, 3)
- Assessing Transformative Programming (2016, December 1)
- Program Marketing for a Campus Community: Two Quick Tips (2017, January 18)
- LMU Speaks: Developing a Storytelling Program from Scratch (2017, March 15)
- Hosting a Long Night Against Procrastination (2017, May 25)
- Keeping Tabs on Deadlines with Excel’s ‘Conditional Formatting’ (2017, June 28)
- 5 Quick Ideas for Banned Books Week (2017, July 27)
- Archiving Library Events: Telling Your Library’s Story (2018, January 11)
- Promoting Your Event: A Timeline (2018, February 28)