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Last month, I gave a presentation at the CARL 2026 conference on the use of AI-generated images in library outreach and communications. Here is the full text of my presentation, adapted for sharing publicly, with select visuals from the slide deck (you can download the full deck from my Scholars @ LMU page).

Introduction

Hi, I’m John Jackson and I’m the head of outreach and engagement at the William H. Hannon Library at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. I’m here to hopefully encourage and enable you to create narratives that center the real, human connections between your library staff and your students. I’ll talk about some of the theoretical underpinnings of this advice and show you a few examples of how we’ve done this successfully at Loyola Marymount University. But first, I’m going to talk about why you should think twice before using AI generated content in your marketing and outreach materials. Let’s start with an object lesson.

How many of you are familiar with the “Make it More” trend? The “Make It More” trend was an AI generated meme that began on Twitter and Reddit and eventually moved to TikTok in 2023. Here’s how it worked: you prompt an AI image-generating tool like DALLE-3 or MidJourney to make an image. Then, with each proceeding prompt, you ask AI to make it increasingly more ridiculous. Here’s an example:

https://www.tiktok.com/@bookish_cat/video/7314706809661459754

In Fall of 2025, I decided I could do this one better. I asked my student graphic designer Sophia if she could hand-illustrate an image of our library building. I then proceeded to give Sophia increasingly more ridiculous instructions. This was the result:

Who do you think did it better? The response from our followers on Instagram, as well as what felt like the entire online community of artists and illustrators, was overwhelmingly positive. It was, at the time, the most successful Instagram post we had ever created in the 15 years of running our library’s Instagram account. My favorite comment, which came from Hilbert Library, was “How do I get a Sophia?”

Favorable comments such as "I love LMU library" and "Too good!" and "100% perfection"

But John, you may ask: what if I want to use AI generated art? Well, I’m here to tell you using AI-generated art in library marketing and outreach rarely goes well. In fact, in all the examples that I found, the response was either outright negative or dead silence. [At this point in the presentation, I shared some examples from academic libraries. I’m not reproducing them here because I don’t think it would be fair to let them live on in infamy. Most of the AI-generated posts have since been deleted. But here are some examples of the comments]

comments such as "did you get hacked?" and "can you guys stop using AI?"

And it’s not just in libraries. Here are some of the comments from the 2025 Coca-cola holiday commercial that was entirely AI-generated. As one commenter noted: “You know the entire point of these seasonal ads is to pretend you aren’t a soulless mega corporation, right?”

Take a look at the top of the comment section from a New York Mets post that was literally just an AI video of an apple. I like the comment from Dylan here. “Could it have been that hard to go to the top of the roof and put an Apple on the ledge of the building and film it?”

Some of this anti-AI art responses hit pretty close to home in higher ed as well. Here were some of the top responses to UNC’s announcement about the launch of an AI studio. As one person wrote: “Literally no one asked for this.”

And I’m sure many of you heard about the Libby debacle, when it came out that they were ingesting AI-generated books, some of it being labeled as AI slop, which then made it into the packages of ebooks they provide to libraries. The comments were vicious and folks are still responding in this way even on more current posts.

Some companies are even mocking AI as a brand strategy, as you can see that strategy on display here in this Polaroid and Heineken ad, which is making fun of a wearable AI device. So what’s the takeaway here?

Trust matters more than style. Effort matters more than the end result. And using real people and real situations, especially on social media platforms, signals authenticity. This is especially true for cultural and historical institutions like libraries, museums, and archives.

What this talk is not about

I do want to say two things at this point: #1, I’m not just here to talk about social media (though, I am going to come back to it before the end). Instead, I want to talk about the many ways we foster authenticity at the William H. Hannon Library by intentionally focusing on the “faces and places” of the library and by centering the people of our community. What I’m going to present has immediate applications to how libraries do marketing and outreach, but also applies to what we put on our websites, what we show at our events, and what we present in the classroom.

And #2: this is not an anti-AI presentation, because I do think AI can support library outreach, especially in creating more accessible digital experiences, but this presentation is humans-preferred because Rule #1 of marketing is “make something people want.” And I’m here to show you that what people want more than anything, is to feel they belong, and using AI-generated content can be directly oppositional to that desire.

Theoretical background

So let me start by looking briefly at some of the research that undergirds a lot of what I’ll be showing you today. I want to bring your attention to two concepts I’m sure many of you are familiar with: sense of belonging and library anxiety.

Sense of belonging is an individual’s desire to be part of a community and their attachment to a specific place. It includes the ability to project oneself into a future that includes the shared experiences of that community. Library anxiety is the emotional state that arises when a student enters the library. This state can be characterized by stress, fear, shame and confusion.

Research across higher education consistently shows that belonging is a central factor in student success. Psychologists Baumeister and Leary define belonging as a “fundamental human motivation”, putting it alongside essential needs like those we see in Maslow’s hierarchy. And studies repeatedly confirm that students who feel they belong earn stronger grades, persist at higher rates, and experience better mental health (Goplan and Brady, 2019; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2017; Walton and Brady, 2017)

At a campus level, belonging is often measured through three simple questions: whether students feel they can be themselves, whether they feel valued, and whether they feel part of the community. Students who answer “yes” to these questions are more likely to engage with campus resources, including the library, further reinforcing their academic success (Lu, 2023; Yeager et al. 2026; Strayhorn, 2012).

For academic libraries specifically, belonging is shaped largely through relationships: the small, everyday interactions that signal to students that they are seen, respected, and welcomed. In Portal, Couture et al. found that for first-generation students, real-life interactions with library staff are among the most powerful contributors to a sense of belonging. Reed (2025) similarly argues that social relationships with library employees are a primary mechanism through which belonging can be cultivated.

This aligns closely with the literature on library anxiety, a concept grounded in feelings of shame, fear of judgment, and uncertainty about how to navigate the library. A wide body of evidence shows that direct contact with librarians—whether through orientation programs, formal interactions, or informal conversations—significantly reduces library anxiety (Black, 2016; McAfee, 2018). Lackner (2022) summarizes this well: creating human connections that foster belonging is the antidote to library anxiety.

Ramsey and Brown (2018) note that inclusive atmospheres, diverse representation in promotional materials, and visibility of students from marginalized backgrounds help counter the “outsider” feelings inherent in impostor syndrome. Students need to see themselves in the library to believe they belong in it.

This all ties directly into our current conversation about library marketing and communication. Bedenbaugh (2016) and Tanner (2023) argue that “humanizing the library” is essential—not just aesthetically, but psychologically. Students respond more strongly to real faces, real places, and real interactions. Tanner’s findings are explicit: images of real humans perform better, while illustrated or artificial substitutes widen the emotional distance between the library and its users.

Recent research on AI-generated promotional content reinforces this concern. Carvalho et al. (2025) found that even when participants couldn’t reliably distinguish between human- and AI-generated text, the perceived effectiveness dropped as soon as they suspected a message was created by AI. In other words: the more content feels machine-made, the less persuasive it becomes.

To wrap this all up, emerging library-specific research underscores the link between belonging and academic outcomes. Scoulas identifies library employees as a central driver of inclusion. In a later study, Scoulas, Naru, and Yu (2025) connect students’ perceptions of library spaces, collections, and support services directly to their sense of belonging; echoing broader findings that belonging predicts persistence, motivation, resilience, academic achievement, and well‑being.

Across all this research, one message emerges clearly: Students feel like they belong when the library feels human. Belonging is built through authentic interactions and in environments where students feel recognized. These connections are what counteract library anxiety and support ongoing academic success.

Centering the human in library outreach

So let me now talk about how we do that at Loyola Marymount University. I’m going to focus on two areas: Centering the Human in Library Outreach and Centering the Human in Library Marketing. Let’s start with outreach and programming.

images of students in the library playing games

One the first experiences students have with the library at LMU is the Library Open House. We host this annual event every fall semester. It’s essentially a giant carnival where each library department hosts a table with games or a fun activity. The goal isn’t necessarily to teach students anything in particular (though that’s always nice if we do). Instead, our main goal is to introduce students to the “faces and places” of the library. Meet library staff. Explore our building. And hopefully form a bond between staff and students within the physical space of the library.

At the end of the event, we ask students “To what extent do you feel comfortable asking library staff for help?” and for the past four years, 98% report feeling comfortable or very comfortable asking for help after attending the library open house. As one student told us: “It was a very fun and interactive event that helped me feel more comfortable about going to the library in the future. I also was able to meet new Lions while playing the games and exploring all levels of the library.” and “It was great and the energy of the staff made the library a safe/comfortable environment.”

These two comments (and there’s way more where this came from), respectively speak to both reducing library anxiety and fostering a sense of belonging, through the act of person-to-person connection.

posters from LMU Speaks

Another unique event that we’ve hosted for the past 10 years is LMU Speaks. This is a storytelling program, similar to The Moth or NPR Storycorp, where we ask 5 members of our campus community to tell a true, personal story around a central theme. We always invite a mix of faculty, staff, administrators, and students; and the themes are things like “The Fork in the Road” or “Standing on Business” or like we did in 2021 “Hitting the Reset.” At the end of the event, we ask attendees whether they spoke with at least one person they’d never met before.

We also ask them if, as a result of attending this event, they feel a stronger connection to LMU and 100% agreed or strongly agreed. As one attendee noted this past year: “I learned that everyone has struggles you have no idea about that show up in their life in so many ways.” This is fostering a sense of belonging: by helping students see themselves in other students, faculty, and staff.

photos of students listening to a speaker; the speaker at the podium; and a copy of the email invitation

But making these human connections isn’t just something that happens during large, public events. At LMU Library, we also do this behind the scenes. Like many institutions, we have an email marketing platform that allows us to quickly create mass email campaigns. But we also rely heavily on personal, one-to-one email outreach. For example, we have this speaker series called “Faculty Pub Night” where we invite faculty to speak about their latest “publication.” We also serve beer and wine so it’s like a pub with pubs. (Get it?) Anyway, in order to build an audience for this series, my team and I comb through the course catalog and identify specific classes that we think might enjoy whatever the topic of the Faculty Pub Night is. We then individually email the faculty teaching those courses to invite them and their class to the event.

This work is time-consuming, but it also has a much higher ROI than mass emails campaign. It might take me an hour to personalize and send out 20 of these invitations. But if just 1-2 promise to bring their classes? Well, then I’ve got a packed room at our next event. It’s worth the effort. And it’s built on the personal connections that me and my team have built with many of these faculty over the years. They trust me not to spam them and to only contact them if I really think it’s worth their time.

sample of items in the welcome packet that include bookmarks, magnets, stickers, a letter, and the library report

Finally, we send personalized welcome packets to all new staff and faculty at LMU. I know, this sounds crazy. But we get a list of newly hired staff every two weeks from Human Resources. It’s usually about 10-15 people at most. Since we can look up their contact info in Outlook, we put together a packet that includes a welcome letter, our latest annual report, and some library merch. One month after sending those letters, I follow up with a personal email inviting them to come take a one-on-one tour with me of the library, where I talk about the services the library provides for university staff. I end up doing about 2-3 personal tours per month for new employees.

Centering the human in library marketing

So that’s just a sample of what we do to center the human in outreach and programming. Now, I want to shift from talking about events and circle back to talking about marketing and the ways in which we center the human in our external communications work.

When I create content for our external communications, I always strive to center our library users and their personal stories. Last year, we created a six-part video series about some of the people who use LMU library regularly, folks we called our “Library Fans.” Here’s one video about Alexsiya, a graduate student, a parent, and a frequent visitor to our library.

One thing that I think is clear from that video is that the story matters. And some mediums are better at telling stories than others. In the year of our lord 2026, video is king. Primarily short form video. It’s the primary way that most students consume media, especially among teens, 73% of whom, according to Pew Research, reporting using sites like YouTube daily. Of course, anyone who uses Instagram or TikTok knows that the algorithms for both these platforms prioritize video over static images. So if you want you stories to actually get any eyeballs, you really need to focus on developing video content. At LMU, instead of posting static graphics or digital fliers, we primarily focus on promoting our services through video using our own students and staff. Here are two examples of the ways we’ve promoted our film collections at LMU Library.

Now, those videos are fun, but creating video content has a steep learning curve. And the expectations for quality keep getting bumped up a notch all the time. So if video production isn’t in your tool kit, at least use photography. Again, centering real people and real library spaces, preferably your own. Don’t use stock photography: your students can tell.

collection of screenshots from the library's instagram page

49% of the social media posts we’ve created since August 2025 (183 out of 376 total) include photography or video of current LMU students, faculty, staff, or librarians. And that doesn’t include archival photos, like images of students from the university archives, which are also very popular. If you include that, it’s closer to 57%. Only 6% of our IG posts are event fliers and yet we still have high attendance at our events. And our engagement since August 2025 is through the roof. Our content interactions are up 6.6 thousand percent.

One really easy way to center the human in library marketing is to utilize student talent. At LMU Library, I hire a student graphic designer, a student videographer, and 2-3 student social media assistants to help create content each week. Here’s an example of one video that Petra and Jmac made asking folks how they use they library. All of these students were interviewed with consent (and spoiler: students were asked in advance if we could film them), but their responses are genuine and they showcase how actual students actually use our library. I’ll just show you the first one, which we made after someone suggested to me that students don’t know they can use the library without actually going into the library. The resulting video turned out to be a great way to highlight our online resources.

The video work we do is still relatively young in its development. I just started hiring a student videographer a few years ago, but for the past 10 years, I’ve hired a graphic designer, usually a junior or a senior, to help create unique, promotional materials for our events and our collections.

carousel of images, the first showing Radiohead covers with book recommendations and the second showing Wicked-inspired collage with book recommendations

Here are a few examples of Instagram carousels my current student, Sophia Chavez, has created to highlight our Staff Picks LibGuide and our Popular Reading Collection. This Radiohead carousel from a couple months ago knocked our anti-AI library video, the one I showed you at the beginning of this presentation, knocked it out of the top spot on Instagram. It has since been shared more that 2600 times, saved by over 4,000 people, and currently has over a 156,000 views. This post alone brought more than 800 people to our profile page. All of this is hand-illustrated, or at least human-designed promotional materials. However, there’s a caveat.

Content development is one thing. But content strategy requires a more experienced hand. Someone who can see the connections between the library’s value, our strategic priorities, the needs of our users, and the university’s mission. So I do just want to make it clear that I’m not suggesting you hand over all your marketing and promotional work to students, but they can be and should be essential partners in that work.

Librarians at the forefront

Instead, I would like to recommend that you focus on the more stable faces of your library. In keeping with our theme of centering the human, I encourage you to think of yourselves as local influencers. Specifically for your campus community. Or if not you, then think of 1-2 of your colleagues who might be able to do this type of work well. Going back to the research I spoke about earlier, when students know someone who works in the library, when they can put a face to a name, and connect that face to the library as an organization or the library as a service, that will positively reduce library anxiety. That will foster sense of belonging. Even if that face is just someone they regularly see on the library’s website, YouTube page, or social media.

There are a few libraries that I believe are doing this really well. Oklahoma State University Libraries, Kansas State, University of Wyoming, UCSB, Emerson College, and William and Mary Libraries, just to name a few. They have created “recurring characters” in their external communications that have backstories, and lore, and complicated relationships with other recurring characters. Whether it’s library student employees or the dean of the library, there’s a real human face that students can come back to again and again. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that some of the most successful academic libraries on social media are also the libraries that regularly feature people in their promotional content.

Conclusion: A critical framework

So what have we learned. We’ve learned that reducing library anxiety and fostering a sense of belonging are essential to student engagement with the library. We’ve seen how AI-generated content can create the opposite effect and cause students to feel a disconnect with the library’s brand. Finally, we saw examples of how the library’s “faces and places” can be leveraged to strengthen the connection between library users and the library organization.

I want to leave you with some guiding questions and provide you with a critical framework: What value(s) do libraries offer for their community? Does automating our voice and giving over our brand to AI-generated content increase that value? Does it support our values? I would argue that it does not. The library’s voice is not just a tool: it’s a reflection its values. By centering human intelligence in our messaging, we model the kind of discernment we hope to cultivate in our students, discernment that is linked to questions of justice, community building, and community values. We can ask ourselves:

  1. Does the time/effort this saves me erase an opportunity for building a relationship with my community/users? 
  2. How will my community respond when they discover this content is AI generated? (i.e., do you have an art or MFA program on campus?)
  3. Does using AI-generated content reflect the values of my library? My university?
  4. What practical opportunities does not using AI present? (e.g., student employment, building my skill sets, deep learning)

This is a critical framework for thinking about the use of AI-generated content in library outreach and marketing. Looking at these various dimensions, I have critical questions you should ask yourself, why it matters, what might be some indicators of a human-centered practice, and what are some possible red flags. I’ve listed here 8 dimensions for consideration: belonging, authenticity, relationship-building, community impact, equity and inclusion, mission and pedagogy, labor, and brand health.

For example, before using AI-generated content in your outreach, consider how this impacts belonging: does the content I’m creating help students see themselves in the library? Because when they see themselves in our future…. Literally see themselves and their friends in photographs… this helps strengthen persistence and motivation. On the flip side, and this is the “red flags” column, if you’re using AI-generated images, it’s essentially the same as using stock photos: no one will recognize themselves in your messaging.

And here’s part two. For example, looking at DEI, does using AI-generated content reflect diversity or exacerbate imposterization? This matters because students need to see themselves to feel they belong. If you’re doing this right, you’ll have real people telling real stories, rather than homogenized or stereotyped imagery.

This critical framework is applicable not just to the outreach we do through marketing and promotional work, but I would argue it’s also applicable in the classroom, on our websites, and at our service desks. Any one of these dimensions: belonging, authenticity, relationship-building, community impact, equity and inclusion, mission and pedagogy, labor, and brand health… all of these are impacted when we make the decision to outsource our library’s voice to AI-generated content.

And that’s it! I hope you enjoyed the presentation. Again, please feel welcome to connect with me on LinkedIn! Thank you so much for listening!

References

Baumeister R. F., Leary M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529.

Bedenbaugh, R. A. (2016). Marketing is Our Game: Tackling the Library Awareness Gap. Public Services Quarterly, 12(4), 321–328.

Black, S. (2016). Psychosocial reasons why patrons avoid seeking help from librarians: A literature review. The Reference Librarian, 57(1), 35–56.

Carvalho I., et. al. (2025), “Beyond human touch: evaluating the effectiveness of AI, human, and hybrid-generated tourism promotional texts”. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Insights, 8(10), 3804–3824.

Couture, J. et al. (2021). “We’re Gonna Figure This Out”: First-Generation Students and Academic Libraries. Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 21(1), 127–147.

Gopalan, M., & Brady, S. T. (2019). College Students’ Sense of Belonging: A National Perspective. Educational Researcher, 49(2), 134-137.

Lackner, J. (2022). Confronting library anxiety. Public Services Quarterly, 18(3), 224–231.

Lu, A. (2023, May 9). How to Turn Your Campus Into a Place of Belonging. The Chronicle of Higher Education.

McAfee, E. L. (2018). Shame: The emotional basis of library anxiety. College & Research Libraries, 79(2), 237–256.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2017). Supporting students’ college success: The role of assessment of intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies. National Academies Press.

Ramsey, E., & Brown, D. (2018). Feeling like a fraud: Helping students renegotiate their academic identities. College & Undergraduate Libraries, 25(1), 86–90.

Reed, E. (2025). Inclusion and Empathy Are Not Enough: Cultivating Student Belonging in the Academic Library Through Compassion. Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 25(4), 625–641.

Scoulas, J. M. (2021). College students’ perceptions on sense of belonging and inclusion at the academic library during COVID-19. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 47(6), 102460.

Scoulas, J. M., Naru, L., & Yu, Y. (2025). Factors Influencing Undergraduate Sense of Belonging at a Public Research University. Journal of Library Administration, 65(3), 343–360.

Walton G. M., Brady S. T. (2017). The many questions of belonging. In Elliot A. J., Dweck C. S., Yeager D. S. (Eds.), Handbook of competence and motivation (2nd Edition): Theory and application (pp. 272–293).

Strayhorn T. L. (2012). College students’ sense of belonging: A key to educational success for all students. Routledge.

Tanner, L. (2023). “How do you do, fellow kids?”: Staying relevant with college students on your academic library’s social media. Public Services Quarterly, 19(3), 233–239.

Yeager D. S., et al. (2016). Teaching a lay theory before college narrows achievement gaps at scale. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113, E3341–E3348.

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black and white photo of men in suits and pork pie hats celebrating

I’m at the point in my career where I can look back and see trends. I can vividly remember my early obsession with professional networking (2009-2011), the deep dive into critical pedagogy and instruction (2011-2015), the slow rise into outreach (2015-2017), and the crossroads that led to management (2018-present). Assuming I retire between the age of 60-65, this means I am just approaching the half-way point.

That’s a sobering realization.

And it leads me to think “what’s next?” I’ve been invited to apply for associate dean and AUL positions. I don’t yet know if that’s the direction I want to go. I’ve also considered stepping back from management to focus entirely on strategic communications and assessment. I’m not sure that’s a direction I want to go either. Frankly, I’m undecided on what my immediate next step is.

And that’s OK.

What I do notice, however, is an emerging fascination with the professionalization of outreach work. Within academic libraries, there are certain areas of work that are highly professionalized: e.g., reference and instruction, special collections, collection development, e-resources management, and systems. Basically, if there are multiple annual academic conferences dedicated to your line of work in libraries, you can consider your area to be highly professionalized. Also: multiple academic journals on the topic; multiple ACRL sections and interest groups; and professional competencies.

Outreach librarianship, as a stand-alone position, emerged alongside distance education librarians at the dawn of the internet in the 1990s and early 2000s. So in the grand history of academic librarianship, it’s one of the younger specializations. We do have academic journals and we just recently adopted professional competencies, but we are no where near the level of professionalization that, say, reference librarianship or collection development work is at. 

Outreach librarians take many forms: student engagement librarians, communication librarians, first-year experience librarians, various forms of liaison work, management, and instruction-adjacent positions. We also wear many hats, everything from program development and community engagement to marketing and social media strategy. Some are housed within reference and instruction departments, user services teams, or administration; others (like myself) are stand-alone departments. 

With what remains of my career, I think that I want to continue to professionalize the work that outreach librarians do. Developing standardized assessment protocols. Advocating for the hiring of uniquely qualified and skilled individuals. Championing the work of academic libraries that support notable outreach projects. I’m doing some of this work already as the Marketing Column editor for Public Services Quarterly and as a board member of the Library Marketing and Communications Group.

To those ends, these are some of the projects I’d like to work on:

  • Co-lead research that helps to further codify academic library outreach as its own LIS subfield
  • Help to build a robust set of outreach assessment tools
  • Form a community of practice around academic library ROI, storytelling, and communicating value
  • Formally highlight notable examples of successful academic library outreach (see also: RIAL)
  • Write a new book on academic library outreach 
  • Develop a new toolkit for library outreach (let’s bring back the ARL SPEC kits!)
  • Co-teach a course on academic library outreach 

Just to name a few.

Not that I have the time for any of this right now, of course; but as I look at the next 20-ish years of my career, I do want to start moving towards “the next thing.” And if that can be something that leaves an impact on the future of the profession by making it possible for more folks to pursue outreach librarian work along pathways that feel supported and well-trodden, that would be worth the journey.

banner image: Penn[sylvania] Delegation (via library_of_congress on flickr)

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man with clip board inspecting a magnetic tape machine

When it comes to communications and outreach work, I think we often fall prey to the availability bias. This is the tendency to favor what is right in front of you, or what is most readily called to mind, and to assume it is the right or best available option. Case in point: Recently I was having a conversation with my team about how to best promote an event. Someone chimed in with “Put in on the homepage. That way everyone will see it.”

Breathe in.

As librarians, we see our homepage every day. It’s where we often start when helping students with their research. It’s how we most readily access our policies documents and forms. It’s where we go to look up another librarian’s contact information (because for some ungodly reason that information isn’t readily available in Outlook). 

Unfortunately, that’s not how non-librarians and staff experience our website. When most users come to our homepage, they immediately click on “Hours,” “Group Study Room Reservations” or the library catalog search. Most never scroll below the fold to see any of the promotional material posted there. Moreover, the 25% of users who access our site on handheld devices don’t see the promo content because it’s hidden in the mobile interface. A whopping 0.02% of users click on the promo material on our homepage.

That promo material has a purpose, but it’s not there to drive traffic (that’s a story for a different post). The point to understand is that the data doesn’t support the assumption that the homepage is a highly visible space. Or more specifically, that high visibility leads to conversion. It’s not like digital platforms such as Spotify or YouTube where users hang out for long periods of time, and which can use banner ads and takeovers: on our homepage, users are on their way to somewhere else and rarely come back in a single session.

The same could be said of fliers posted in the library. We walk by these spaces multiple times a day into and out of work, on our way to the bathrooms, or to a meeting. But that isn’t how most users experiences our spaces. Most users pop in to quickly grab a resource, to print something out, or to meet up with friends in a study room. At best, they might make two passes by a poster or a flier, and usually on the way to somewhere else. There are effective ways to use print media in a library context that might catch a student’s attention, but they don’t include a flier posted to a wall or sitting in an acrylic holder on a service desk. 

This isn’t to say that the library homepage and fliers are not somewhat effective. Perhaps in the “long tail” of library outreach, they do make a difference, especially over longer periods of time. But if we’re using metrics like engagement per visit, the numbers are essentially zero. 

Intentional outreach like email marketing, tabling, word of mouth via faculty, and social media (to an extent) are far more effective methods. The number of people I can get to scan a QR code to register for a workshop by talking to them 1:1 at a tabling event, or to click on an e-resources link in a personalized email, or engage with an entertaining social media post reminding students about a library policy, is far higher than any website embed or printed flier. Again, this isn’t to say those latter methods don’t move the needle at all, but our faith in their efficacy is grossly overestimated, I suspect, due to our overfamiliarity with them. 

I might even go so far as to suggest that passive outreach, like fliers and website posts, is more about making us feel better. We feel we’ve done something. We can brush off ours hands and go home. Promotion achievement unlocked! But the data doesn’t hold up. To effectively connect with students and faculty, you need intention. You need strategy. You need a plan. And you need to follow the data. 

Breathe out.

What I’m reading

🫣🇺🇸✏️ The Erasure of Diverse American Histories by Trevor Dawes. “American history is not a single narrative but a complex tapestry of interrelated stories. When we attempt to simplify this tapestry to showcase only certain threads, we not only do a disservice to historical accuracy but also deny future generations the full understanding of how our nation developed through the contributions of people from all backgrounds.”

🤝👊🏛️ Colleges Face a Prisoner’s Dilemma by David Asch. “If universities can see past the outcomes of any single encounter, and can reawaken the mutual trust they have long operated with, they may reset the terms of engagement between higher education and the state”

Links to the past

  • 1 year ago: At least one of these books is still in my TBR pile.
  • 5 years ago: I was only just beginning to understand what quarantine would do to my work-life balance, but I was coping as best as I could.
  • 10 years ago: I was publishing, presenting, and (most importantly) building a Battledecks competition for ACRL 2015. We should bring those back.
  • 15 years ago: I was reading André Cossette’s “Humanism and Libraries.” Wow, this is the first time I’ve added the 15 year marker to this section!

Overheard online

If they make a John Wick 5, I want it to be set in afterlife and Wick is contracted by the ruler of said afterlife to kill renegade demons/spirits. The payment is to be reunited with his wife and the puppy from the first film. The final scene shows him opening his wallet to look at his newly resurrected identity and it says John Constantine. — @fskornia on Mastodon 

banner image: Atlas Negative Collection Images on flickr

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My colleague Ray Andrade and I recently published an article on our outreach successes (and some failures) with first-year college students. We utilize a home-grown mix of programming, communications, and 1:1 connections to foster student engagement.

Starting with the knowledge that using the library within their first semester at college is correlated with academic success, the outreach team and the Hannon Library have employed a variety of tactics to get students in the door. By creating engaging orientation videos, promoting the library at in-person campus fairs, fostering word of mouth by working directly with niche communities, leveraging existing communication channels and email marketing, and hosting an open house early in the semester, we have cultivated an ecosystem in which the library’s brand can take root and thrive.

Read the whole article at Marketing Library Services (now integrated with Computers in Libraries).

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I jokingly referred to “Rule #2 of the outreach team” in a meeting last week to which someone aptly responded, “So what are the other rules?” That’s a good question. We like to stay flexible on my team (it’s necessary when most of your work is collaboration-based), so there are rarely hard and fast rules. But here are a few maxims we live by.

  • Rule 1: Make something people want
  • Rule 2: Save everything to Box
  • Rule 3: Invite more people to the table
  • Rule 4: Dirty hands make it right
  • Rule 5: “Yes and”

Of course, rules are meant to be broken so here are the notable exceptions:

  • Rule 5 (with caveat): Yes and… but we can’t say yes to everything.
  • Rule 4 (with caveat): Dirty hands make it right… but don’t be a hero.
  • Rule 3 (with caveat): Invite more people to the table… but always be clear who will make the call.
  • Rule 2 (with caveat): Save everything to Box… [actually, there’s no exception to this rule]
  • Rule 1 (with caveat): Make something people want… but sometimes you have to make them want to want it first.

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library annual report and fliers from recent events

I’ve been thinking about something I heard at the LMCC 2023 conference: “Marketing should drive usage which in turn creates impact” (source: Cordelia Anderson). 

I often forget that middle piece when developing outreach strategies for my library. At the risk of oversimplifying, I’m extending Anderson’s use of the word “marketing” to the entire outreach enterprise. For sure, there are programs and initiatives the directly impact usage: a recent campaign to promote our streaming video collection, the curation of recommended reading lists, and the annual open house. However, there are some programs that skip right over usage to create the end-goal of impact: our storytelling programming, our faculty speaker series, and our haunted library. These latter programs directly impact our students by creating a sense of belonging and bringing together our community through the celebration of its creative works, but that impact isn’t achieved via the library’s services and collections. 

I would consider creating impact via the library’s services and collections to be a traditional approach to library outreach, one often taken by teams where outreach work is embedded within reference and instruction departments. This is where you find info lit workshops, custom bibliographies, instructional handouts, e-resources campaigns, video tutorials, etc. For teams like the one I manage (we are our own “outreach and engagement” department separate from our colleagues who focus on teaching and collections building) we go straight to the impact: feel good events, mental health programs, community building, productivity support, and service learning opportunities. The motivations for our work come unfiltered straight from either the library’s broader mission or the university’s strategic goals. 

I’m not suggesting one type of outreach is better than the other. Having both is important, but finding the optimal balance between the two is a conversation for every individual, team, library, and organization to determine on their own terms. 

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text on a magnetic board that reads "whisper in the library not today"

It’s a common misconception that word of mouth is “organic”: that it just happens; but this belief negates the agency required for word of mouth (WOM) to be successful. WOM requires antecedents: specifically, customer commitment, trust, and customer satisfaction, according to one meta-analysis of 60 years of WOM research (Lang and Hyde 2013). These positive traits need to exist prior to WOM marketing efforts, which can be either direct or indirect and produce both positive and negative affective, cognitive, and behavioral effects on customers.

It is the role of the outreach librarian to play three leadership roles vis-a-vis WOM marketing: building the foundation; indirectly managing WOM; and directly managing WOM.

Building the foundation requires working with all units within the library to ensure high-quality service, collections, and programs, and then aligning external messaging with that expectation of quality. Indirect WOM management involves much of the usual promotional work that raises awareness of the library (e.g., videos, blog posts, and testimonials), but also includes work that encourages student-staff relationships (e.g., student engagement activities, meet-and-greet events, student advisory boards). Direct WOM management involves far more targeted work, including paid testimonials, viral marketing, rewards for sharing library content, and student ambassador programs.

I would hazard to guess that outreach librarians spend most of their time on indirect WOM management, not enough time on building the foundation, and almost no time on direct WOM management (the latter for lack of funds no doubt). 

We are at a distinct advantage being on a college campus. While colleges are not completely closed information systems (cf. Chatman’s seminal work on information sharing in prisons), messages can get trapped within the system even when the nodes (i.e. students) swap out every four years. Like any pseudo-insular organization, ideas that develop on campus can linger long after their initial spark. This is word of mouth. Moreover, we have a captive audience. So while our ideas have to compete with many other units on campus, we are somewhat shielded by the marketing influences of the off-campus world. 

So when something spreads “word of mouth” on a campus, don’t be too quick to attribute it to the innate qualities of the message or the nature of the service, collection, or program you’re promoting. Instead, consider the foundation that has already been established and how you might continue to actively maintain that foundation into the future. This is the work of the outreach librarian.

References

Chatman, E. A. (1999). A theory of life in the round. Journal of the American Society for information Science, 50(3), 207-217.

Lang, B., & Hyde, K. F. (2013). Word of mouth: what we know and what we have yet to learn. Journal of Consumer Satisfaction, Dissatisfaction and Complaining Behavior, 26, 1-18.

image credit: Charles Hackley Agency on Flickr, cc-by 2.0

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There comes a time in every librarian’s life when your library decides to migrate the catalog. No matter what role you play in the organization, you’re gonna feel it. This past year, MPOW moved from Sierra to Alma, the first such migration in 30 years. As the head of outreach and engagement, I would be responsible for overseeing campus messaging. 

In September 2022, I drafted the initial communications plan. This included key messages and their explanation, a list of target audiences (both primary and secondary), communications channels, deliverables and assets to be created, a production and implementation timeline, and a matrix of responsibility that listed who was responsible for creating what and when. I presented this draft to our ILS Migration Steering Committee, the library’s leadership council, and various stakeholders. Six iterations later I had a completed plan. 

Along the way, I asked for buy-in from each and every stakeholder. I recorded the changes to the plan in a change log, and noted the date of each stakeholder approval. A created lists of every action item and recorded who was responsible for every asset and its deadline. I created a list of check-in dates—three for every stakeholder—by which I would touch base about various aspects of the plan.

It was a robust plan. The most robust plan I’ve ever created. And while I cannot prove that it was foolproof, the library successfully migrated its catalog with no campus outcry. Certainly, there were some complaints: many of the functions previously available are currently still in production as we slowly check off all our post-migration to-dos. But not a single person has said they were unaware of the change. In fact, many faculty and staff have made comments to the effect of “oh, I heard your have a big systems change happening…”

Now, one could read this as indifference, but as a the person who oversees communications, I read this as success. “So, you’ve heard of me, then.”

What I’m reading

In this essay I will: On distraction by David Schurman Wallace

“A common idea of distraction presupposes that you’re turning away from something more important that you ought to be paying attention to instead. And you ought to be working all the time.”

LeVar Burton Wants You to Read Banned Books by Heven Haile

“I think, in truth, the effect of book bans has been limited. What happens, though, is people who engage in this kind of censorship self-identify as folks you need to keep your eye on. And for me, that’s gold, because now I see you.”

Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible by Gabe Bullard

“Recognizing that social media is not a key to clicks seems like a correction to years of chasing traffic through outside platforms.”

Links to the past

  • 1 year ago: Service work is broken. Relying on committees to accomplish work that is operationally necessary to the library, while also expecting (read: allowing) those committee seats to be filled by “volunteers” is a recipe for failure.
  • 6 years ago: Subtle nudges in library programming. How we at MPOW try to subtly remind our guests about future events (other attempts are not so subtle).
  • 10 years ago: When parenting was easy. It’s been mostly downhill since then.

Overheard online

Correspondence disclaimers through history

1660: I have written you a long letter because I did not have time to write a short one.
1950: Dictated but not read
2010: Sent from my phone, please excuse typos
2030: Composed by AI

overholt on Mastodon

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folder of library handouts and an introductory letter

“Hailing frequencies still open, sir.”

“The Corbomite Maneuver”, Star Trek (1966)

Before the pandemic, I was passionate about outreach to university staff at MPOW. Our weekly all-campus email used to include a photo of the attendees at the bi-weekly HR orientations (which of course used to only be held in person). The photo’s caption included the names of the newly onboarded employees. Using our online directory, I would pull the departmental and mailing information of the new folks and prepare a library welcome packet for each (seen above). It included: a custom letter outlining the various library services that might appeal to staff members, a copy of our latest annual report, a list of upcoming events, and various swag* items.

I would diligently send these packets through intercampus mail, being sure to track when and to whom I sent these off. Within 1-2 weeks, I would follow up via email to see if they had received the package (oftentimes, folks would contact me directly to express their appreciation) and offer to set up a tour of the library. But I didn’t stop there. I also set a reminder to follow up with each new employee one year later to see how things were going and if they had any new questions about using the library.

I was incredibly proud of this workflow and the connections it created, not just between myself and staff from other units, but also between those units and the library. COVID upended that entire project. HR stopped posting the photos to our internal all-campus newsletter (because who wants to see yet another Zoom screen shot). And even though new staff orientation have returned to in-person, the information about new employees is no longer published to the campus community. 

Of course, I don’t put all my staff outreach eggs in that basket. My team and I host “VIP Staff Library Tours” twice a year, first during the Thanksgiving week and again during our campus staff appreciation week in the summer. We regularly invite staff to our events, and collaborate on various events with other units, such as our finals stress relief events, annual storytelling program, and one-offs like the Human Library and Long Night Against Procrastination. University staff continue to be an important connection point between the library and students.

Yet I miss the one-on-one outreach to new employees. I am still passionate about outreach to university staff, but I’ve yet to regain the momentum we lost post-2020.

*My student employees tell me that “swag” is no longer a cool word.

What I’m reading

The Platform Wars by Joshua Citarella

“Once these ideological views are coded in, users will not be able to exit to their preferred political values because they remain materially reliant on other lock-in features of the stack: like cash and health care data that are non-transferable.”

My students are using AI to cheat. Here’s why it’s a teachable moment by Siva Vaidhyanathan

“It’s a library without librarians, consisting of content disembodied and decontextualized, severed from the meaningful work of authors, submitted to gullible readers. These systems are, in Alvarado’s words, ‘good at form; bad at content’.”

Those aren’t “Tweets”, Those Are Your Thoughts by CJ the X

“People who habitually use Twitter will often make comments about Twitter as if it’s synonymous with lived experience.“Everyone is saying *this* about *that*.” Everyone? Like who? Someone you know? This line of questioning consistently produces the admission that ‘Everyone’ meant ‘The thread I scrolled through while on the toilet.'”

News from the garden

I’m worried about my peaches this year. To start, the tree didn’t produce as many fruiting stems as usual, and of those it did, they didn’t produce as many buds. Then as you can see from the image above, I got leaf curl (despite my diligent application of dormant spray in winter). I’ll still get a small crop, but I may not be canning as much as I did last year.

Links to the past

  • 2 years ago: Garden seeds and room. I am well into midlife, and I’m still not sure that I’ve found “a task life-long given from within”, but I am lucky to have most of these others in my life.
  • 7 years ago: The opportunity to breathe. There are a few stories that irrevocably changed my outlook on work and rest. This one I still think about frequently.
  • 10 years ago: On Lincolnshire Posy. There is no lie.

Overheard online

Tristopher: What exactly is the academic dream?

Elsevier: Spending your entire youth creating knowledge, then paying a billion dollar corporation to take it from you in exchange for career capital that you can then use to buy meaningless promotions from other exploited individuals.

Tristopher: That’s the dream?

Elsevier: I didn’t say it was a good dream.

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One of the more difficult aspects of my job as an outreach librarian is the need to wrangle people together for a common cause. This need is constant, recurring, never-ending. There is very little that I do which doesn’t require asking someone else to set aside their time, resources, and/or attention to support a project that I’m working on for the library. My work consists of finding connections between and among others in relation to the library. Though this type of work could be required of any librarian from time to time, it is my daily work.

This frequently puts me at odds with my colleagues. It’s like that meme about everyone’s reaction when the social media person shows up to your office: Shit. Shit. Shit. When I come a calling’, you can be assured that something is about to be added to your plate. For some, this may be invigorating! The novelty of a new project or a new partner. For others, it may be a frustration, especially if there is a sense that one cannot say no.I try to be considerate. When possible, I do some of the groundwork in advance. I provide concrete deadlines, estimates of time needed, and suggestions for how this work could be mutually beneficial.

Ultimately, the job of the outreach librarian is to make connections and promote the library, and like any job, the part that involves people is the hardest part.