This valuable book shows how to get your community behind your library by making it an essential part of community life and demonstrating its benefit to all members of the community. Evolving technologies and the changing social landscape have put pressure on public libraries to shift their service values and methods in order to maintain funding opportunities. The challenge is substantial: library managers today must adopt a new mindset in order to perform a broad spectrum of activities and attract new users who are not traditional library patrons. Small Libraries, Big Impact: How to Better Serve Your Community in the Digital Age helps readers to meet the challenge of serving diverse users via a community-centered library. Based on an intensive review of literature on serving library users in smaller libraries as well as the author's own research findings gained from interviewing 55 library directors, this book provides conceptual and practical tools for serving 21st-century users, gaining wider community support, programming dynamic events, and planning rewarding technology learning. Beyond supplying actionable advice, the book will also review relevant concepts and theoretical frameworks, such as community outreach and partnership, social justice and social inclusion, technology and social transition, cultural diversity and the digital divide, entrepreneurship, outreach, best practices for marketing libraries, and library space design.

Libraries that thrive reach out to all parts of their communities. Stellar community outreach plans help libraries build the strong partnerships that undergird these critical ties. Most librarians know they must reach out to the community to be successful, but many do not always know the best way to make that happen. Here's a practical manual designed specifically to help librarians conceptualize and then implement an outreach program that will achieve good results. Through examples of library roles within community outreach, outreach needs assessment, and great tips on implementing your plan, the authors give you the clear cut advice you need to build the perfect outreach plan. Barbara Blake, Robert Martin, and Yunfei Du have years of experience working with libraries to build community outreach programs. Here's what you get: Part one: shows you sample vision and mission statements, lists realistic goals to target in your community, and demographic factors to consider. Part two: highlights potential programs and partners, and gives you advice on how to "pitch" your plan for optimal community support. Part three: teaches you how to develop and implement the outreach plan. Written for all public librarians, the concise, step-by-step process delivers the information you want in the format that you need it. A bibliography of public library resources make finding further information a snap; and worksheets on the companion CD-ROM make your job easier by providing ready-to-go outreach plans for writing and implementing your own plan. With this book, your library will go from being seen as a nicety to a necessity.