School Library Advocacy

It is great that AASL has given a guide for responding to a crisis.  Of course, AASL also points out in its "Crisis Toolkit" that it is always better to prepare for crisis prevention before the crisis, but for librarians who find themselves suddenly at the crisis point, this page provides some helpful tips as well as tools for further help.  When navigating through a crisis, it is important that librarians get as many folks on board with them as possible.  This includes people not in the librarian profession.  The more people to back up the importance of the library, the more likely the library will pull through the crisis.  When reaching out to these people, librarians must be sure to communicate their purpose effectively.

AASL also defines advocacy, public relations, and marketing on its site.  I really like the advocacy definition: "On-going process of building partnerships so that others will act for and with you, turning passive support into educated action for the library program."  This definition further reinforces AASL's point about making sure to always reach out to your library community in order to prevent crisis before it can happen.  The "educated action" bit is nice too - it ties in to the whole point that school libraries are there to provide the best education for their students.  Once the community is educated on the importance of the library, they will make sure the library continues to provide education for its students.

The AASL "School Library Program Health and Wellness Toolkit" is the place to go when taking measures to prevent the crisis in the first place.  AASL lists many additional resources on this page.  School librarians should really take a look at this page.  At the very least, school librarians will be made aware of how important it is to take action to make sure their library is important to its school community.  AASL certainly draws importance to the issue by dedicating several web pages to advocacy and crisis prevention.

In the article "How Does a Culture Mean?"  the authors discuss the importance of always being prepared with an elevator speech.  Such an attempt to promote the library could gain some very important relationships with fellow educators or other members of the school community.  Being prepared to speak about your library is important, but so is knowing when to take advantage of an opportunity to speak about your library.  The authors give an example of someone stopping by to reserve a room in the library.  The librarian skillfully turns the conversation into an opportunity for collaboration and promotion of the library.

The Coatney essay also mentions maintaining an online web presence, doling out grant writing responsibilities, getting involved in library committees, and participating in legislature.  All of the above are great opportunities to reach out to multiple folks at one time on behalf of the school library.  Grant writing especially will raise awareness - not only will grant writers get to know the school library really, really well, but funders will now also be made aware of the importance of the school library. 

Many of these tools for promoting advocacy are right online - librarians certainly have many tools at their fingertips!  We should take advantage of literature and other online resources to help promote our libraries.