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Geek the Library: How to Use Research-Based Strategies to Raise Awareness and Funding for Your Libra



Geek the Library was a campaign designed to highlight the vital role of public libraries and raise awareness about the critical funding issues many libraries face. This campaign was developed based on the research findings included in From Awareness to Funding: A study of library support in America. This study, published by OCLC in 2008, found that increasing funding support for public libraries requires changing community perceptions. (See also 2018 updates to this research.)


Geek the Library introduces "geek" as a verb and encourages the public to talk about what they "geek" ? whether it's engineering, superheroes or art. The public awareness campaign illustrates the fact that everyone is passionate about something and the library supports them all.




geek the library campaign management center



The public awareness campaign hopes to start a conversation about library funding to inspire more people to take responsibility for keeping their local public libraries vital in their communities; however, the campaign will not support or oppose any candidate for public office, nor attempt to influence legislation.


For many years on this level of conferences, we would hear all the SEO geeks lament the lack of collaboration with PPC departments and incompatibility in data sets. But this year, I heard the PPC geeks suggest that a learning organization should be harvesting queries from both organic and paid to build a proprietary library of entities to enrich search marketing operations over time. Perhaps at long last, we will see a technical integration of the two parallel lines of search marketing, organic and paid in harmony.


OCLC's advocacy campaign "Geek the Library", started in 2009, highlights the role of public libraries. The campaign, funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, uses a strategy based on the findings of the 2008 OCLC report, "From Awareness to Funding: A study of library support in America".[41]


Other past advocacy campaigns have focused on sharing the knowledge gained from library and information research. Such projects have included communities such as the Society of American Archivists, the Open Archives Initiative, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the International Organization for Standardization, the National Information Standards Organization, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Internet Engineering Task Force, and Internet2. One of the most successful contributions to this effort was the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, "an open forum of libraries, archives, museums, technology organizations, and software companies who work together to develop interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models."[36]


In 2013, OCLC acquired the Dutch library automation company HKA[57][58] and its integrated library system Wise,[25] which OCLC calls a "community engagement system" that "combines the power of customer relationship management, marketing, and analytics with ILS functions".[24] OCLC began offering Wise to libraries in the United States in 2019.[25]


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