First established in America in 1958, and sponsored by ALA, National Library Week celebrates the contributions of all libraries be they corporate, school, public or academic and the wonderful staff who serve the needs of their library’s users. In this, its 60th year, National Library Week runs between April 8 – 14. This year’s theme is “Libraries Lead”.

During this week American libraries of all types, find ways to promote their services. ALA provides tools and resources that are of help to library staff via a dedicated website http://ala.org/nlw

How some of our Liberty customers mark the week

Vedder Price Library

During a recent Liberty training session with Softlink’s Customer Community Manager Maida Rubin, the Vedder Price library staff, and their Manager Deb Abram, discussed how they began celebrating National Library Week five years ago.

“It’s about interacting with our patrons and the best way to attract them to the library is with treats, contests and prizes. We choose a theme and we use our space very effectively. It’s exciting to see the shared enthusiasm throughout the office and serves as a great reminder of the services we provide to our patrons through our library resources.”

The 2017 National Library Week went down so well, that throughout the year the attorneys and non-legal staff have been asking, “When is library week?”

Porter Wright Library

Sue Schaefgen, Director of Library Services at the Porter Wright Library, kindly provided images of their 2017 and 2018 library banners customized for National Library Week. The image of their 2017 banner identified it was National Library Week and included the statement by the author Neil Gaiman, that brilliant advocate for libraries and librarians, on the difference between Google and a librarian.

Using this year’s National Library Week theme of “Libraries lead…” the Porter Wright Library’s banner has again been customized to incorporate the theme and their focus on AI.

The staff have planned a number of activities including:

• A movie trivia quiz that they send out to everyone
• A puzzle in the lunch room that everyone can do (and a drawing to win the puzzle)
• A “muted” movie that they play in the lunch room, for people to guess the title.  We also have popcorn in the lunch room that afternoon.
• A book and movie exchange in the lunch room
• A list of favorites that they collect (last year it was favorite vacation spots and this year it is favorite websites)
• A candy jar with guess the number of candies (closest guess wins jar)
• A special non-legal “lunch & learn” talk, this year on Mars exploration
• A couple of training sessions for legal research
• And daily research tips

Sullivan & Worcester

Rebecca Carpenter, the Technical Services Librarian at Sullivan & Worcester let us know of a fantastic trivia activity that ran for the whole week in 2017 where, “each day library staff pose a research/reference question to our entire law firm. These questions are geared to help our attorneys learn about the different resources and products we have available. This also serves the secondary purpose of introducing new products and resources. The first three people receive a prize.” Each of the three winners received a mug with a very salient message!

Australia and the UK celebrate their National Books Week in May and October respectively. We hope to bring examples of how our customers are planning to celebrate the week!