BJORN THE LIBRARIAN

Internet Librarian Conference 2008

Internet Librarian 2008 was hosted this week in beautiful Monterey, California. Monterey is a quick 20 minutes south of where I work as a Librarian in Salinas. I managed to clear my schedule on Monday, Oct. 20th and spent a day the conference.

This decision turned out to be GREAT for several reasons…

1. The Weather. It was sunny and warm. This was a perfect day to be out of the office and hanging out in downtown Monterey.


2. Nancy Dowd is the Director of Marketing and Public Relations for New Jersey State Library. Her presentation was comprehensive and compelling. Nancy highlighted the importance of Library Marketing to GO GREEN, be AUTHENTIC, accept IMPERFECTIONS and use transformational STORIES. These are all uniquely important talking points worthy of their own blog articles (maybe next time).


3. The DOK boys. I spoke briefly with Erik Boekesteijn and Jaap van de Geer from DOK. In our four minute conversation we concluded that librarians are often too homogeneous. Our industry needs librarians from a wide variety of professional backgrounds in order to spark the risk-taking and innovative tendencies needed to change libraries for the future. Professional diversity is crucial to surviving (and surviving well) in our modern society.
   

The BEST idea that I received from attending the Internet Librarian 2008 Conference was from Nancy Dowd. She strongly suggested that libraries create a Story Bank. The Story Bank is a list of people whom the library has positively effected. This list includes the person’s name, an overview of the person’s story, contact information and if they are willing to share their story (a.k.a. be interviewed by a reporter).

Thanks to all the people I met and spoke with on Monday! You have inspired me...

 

Wordtracker Library Keywords

Wordtracker Results for "library"
Wordtracker is an online service designed to help businesses optimize their search engine ranking. The idea centers on strategically placing popular keywords in titles and content areas of your website. Knowing which keywords to use it crucial! If you are selling a product you need to know the specific words people are using to search for that product.

I jumped over to Wordtracker and conducted a quick five-minute search for terms relating to libraries. The "Count" column in this screenshot represents the number of times the term has been entered into search engines over the past 100 days. Check out a few additional results...

• librarian 338
  
• library2.0 6
• web 2.0 library 5
  
• Web 2.0 + libraries 17
• Web 2.0 libraries 15
• library marketing 5
  
• library 2.0 'rss feeds' 18
  

• flickr 7939
  
• social networking 492
  
• myspace 179136
• blog 1853
  
• blogs 1826
• Poddcasting 266
• Podcast 1050
• Podcasts 1030

Is online marketing important to public libraries? It should be!!! Finding out what library related keywords are being used can be helpful for building an online presence for libraries. Popular search terms should be used when librarians are posting to their library blogs or websites.

You can do your own Wordtracker search for FREE. A two hour trial is available if you have a name and email address... Go for it!