Developing @ your library^® locally
Special thanks to Jennifer Dekker of Oshawa Public Library for providing the following notes.

Ignite and unite: a model for organizing A REGIONAL MEETING

Know what you want to accomplish:
Our goal was to bring the @ your library^® brand to the Durham Region. We wanted Durham libraries to pull together and use our common strength to bring the brand to the region. Therefore, our goal was to include all libraries in Durham, regardless of whether they were OLA members, and regardless of their size or type.

Work with a partner:
Organizing a large meeting can be very time consuming requires a lot of organization. Working with another person (especially from a different type of library) makes the task more manageable.

Decide on an area, then invite every library in it:
We decided to contact all libraries in the Durham Region and sent an invitation to every library listed in the Directory of libraries in Canada for our area. We sent invitations to the Chief Librarians or heads of libraries, and asked them to pass it on to staff members. We did not exclude anyone! We made it clear in our letter that this brand is for everyone.

Invite your library board members and your Friends group
Don’t forget that these people support libraries and want to be part of library advocacy.

Organize the session.
Once you’ve decided on the date time and place, you’ll need to present some information on the brand. We chose to do a PowerPoint presentation and then, because we had a large group (35 – 40 people), we broke up into smaller groups to discuss issues surrounding the brand.

The questions we asked people to address were:
1) how do you see the brand working in your library, and
2) how do you see the brand working for all Durham region libraries?
Finally, one person from each group presented on their discussion. All of the ideas were written on large sheets of paper, which were collected at the end of the session.

Follow up:
Following the session, all of the ideas presented were collated into a single document, which was then emailed out to all of the participants. This provided a springboard from which all the libraries could work.

The Durham librarians plan to come together again to see what people have been able to do, to share experience and to help those who have not started. Working together encourages everyone to participate and is a great reason for getting together – a good idea at the best of times.