Leadership Means Acknowledgment

Do you credit your MBLC Certification status, library network or region on your website? How about your flyers or annual report? How is general public going to know that it is important for us to remain State Certified Public Libraries, or members of our region or network if they don’t even know that we are?

Adding a tag line to your web site is an important first step to alert your customers to the fact that you are more than just a single entity operating individually. We need to stress what each of these memberships does for us, as a library. Too often, libraries don't bring about a conversation about these important certifications or memberships until they are in danger of losing them. We need to tell the public now why each membership and certification we have are necessary to our operation. How else would a non-librarian know that Regions pay for delivery, or we get internet service through our network, or certification means they can borrow anything from any library in the state as easily as they can?

Being a leader means acknowledging partnerships and memberships that are beneficial to your organization. I can’t think of any other items that mean more to a Public Library than Certification, Region and Network. All three provide resources that we could not do without and still be what our customers want us to be.

My Plainvillepubliclibrary.org tag lines are as follows:

Proud Member Of:
[SAILS logo] Providing Resource Sharing, circulation and internet and MIS services
[SEMLS logo] Providing Daily Material Delivery and Databases
[MBLC logo] Certified Public Library: FY07

Add this information to your literature every chance you get. People need to see or hear something at least 3 times to remember it. Start the conversation now!