I don’t have any suggestions because I’m not entirely sure what would work. Hence, why I was asking others. I hoped to either get an inkling of an answer or inspiration for one of my own. I think your answer to my post illustrates why you don’t advocate for other libraries without providing its own recourse.

I’m sure part of the answer is a lack of education of the general public to why its important, but that’s something rife in the profession as it is.

I had not seen your video before, nor seen any of the toolkit. When I was watching the video, it was a great feeling to hear you say everything that I had been thinking for the last couple of months. I plan on exploring more of the Advocacy U pages later tonight, but that does bring up another question: what kind of use is the toolkit getting? While the area was placed on the national organization’s site, how much does it get used? I had not heard of it till I saw the video, so it concerns me that it is resource that is unknown or (worse) forgotten.

Oddly enough, I had written about a library ecosystem after attending ALA Midwinter 2010. While I had not attended any of the conference speeches or workshops, I guess some of your ideas got through to people who I talked with. http://agnosticmaybe.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/the-library-ecosystem/

(In addition, your second link goes to a page that informs the reader to watch for updates in Spring 2009. You may wish to update or change this.)

I have used the term library ecosystem to illustrate the interrelatedness of our different types of libraries and the importance of advocacy on behalf of all types of libraries. See a brief text explanation of this at
http://jimrettig.org/content/initiatives/advocacy.htm or watch the video that introduces the Coalition Building toolkit. There I explore the ecosystem concept in greater depth.

I’m an academic librarian. My university gets maybe 65% of the state aid dollars per a student that the larger, more well known schools in our state get. I would be happy to advocate for public libraries, except I’ve already got my hands full just doing my job. Sure, we should share more (and I do think that ALA helps that – I’m a member and it is worth every penny), but this is a case of saying we should do it differently and not offering suggestions on how.

I’d also like to point out that one of the reasons why we tend not to mix is because we have such different goals. My job is to serve my students, the bit research universities serve their faculty, and the public library serves their community (to say nothing of corporate and special libraries). It’s hard to advocate across the board when we all have different things to advocate for. As much as we like to believe it, a library is not a library is not a library. We’re all very different.

When a school library closes/threatens to close, where do the public libraries stand? To say (and I’ve seen and heard things from casual conversation to blog posts etc) “oh, this is what the public library can do now that the school library is gone” shows a failure of understanding about what the school library & librarian actually do. I think it’s said out of concern for the students, and it’s said because public librarians love to say “yes, we can do that!”, but sometimes not only is the answer no — no, a public library is NOT a school library — but to say yes does our entire profession a disservice. If we don’t respect the various roles of libraries and librarians, including their unique needs and missions, how can other people — the others who fund libraries?

I think people would say that there is an advocacy effort going on at a higher level and that would be ALA. I’ll wait to see who wants to jump on that topic.