Fellow New Jersey librarian and all around stellar librarian Valerie Forrestal posted a brilliant idea on her blog Ridiculously Digitally Ubiquious. Her idea is to take donated popular books, pop in a little note about the library along with contact information including website and social media handles, and drop them off in public places. The idea that people can find them, post their location or a review of them on a blog or the website, and pass them along.
In thinking her idea through, it’s an extremely inexpensive way to market the library with a very catchy local appeal. I can imagine some of the objections that might be raised since material budgets are generally down, but I think it could be done with discarded popular books as well. There are some good viable variations to this idea that I think people might consider as well. The book could be returned to the library for some sort of reward or incentive. It could be part of a library sponsored scavenger hunt. The placement of books in public could be done in conjunction with a library promotion. That’s just a few offshoots and I’m certain there are more out there!
Well done Val!
Nice idea. Have you ever heard of http://www.bookcrossing.com ? :)
I like it.
We did something similar with Bookcrossing.com for our community reads program. We didn’t get a lot of books logged but it was fun to see where they ended up.
could be an interesting use for popular books that are gifted by patrons (i know this doesn’t happen all the time, but it does answer the concern about using materials budgets being down).