Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Patron Attraction

The title of this post is not referring to that cute guy or girl who you noticed in the stacks the other day, but rather is the beginning of a question: what's your best method to attract patrons? Do you use conventional methods (school visits, newspaper blurbs, word-of-mouth, etc.)? Or do you have a secret up your sleeve?

And what about those more controversial methods? Check out this article from the NY Times:

New York Region
Urban Fiction Goes From Streets to Public Libraries
By ANNE BARNARD
Published: October 23, 2008
Many libraries are embracing a sometimes controversial genre of “street lit” in an effort to attract new readers.

Let's use the comments section to discuss!

2 comments:

Claudia Backus said...

Gaming is bringing patrons of all ages into public libraries in Waukesha County. We can barely keep up with the requests for equipment. Next year, every library will get its own Wii but the larger libraries are running 5 at a time!

Marge Loch-Wouters said...

We started an early literacy initiative in March encouraging parents to read 1000 books to their preschoolers before they start kindergarten. We just signed up our 400th family and our book circ and room usage has soared (increases of 30% every month!). We cobbled funding together from many sources (Target, Rotary, Friends of Library) to fund binders, stickers, printing and CD's to "reward" the readers. It has been an unbelievable draw that brings families in at least 10 times to the library and - we hope- creates a "library habit" beyond the duration of the program!