Crowdsource Your Library, Engage Your Community

Book excerpt: This book illustrates crowdsourcing techniques that will help you to raise money and collect community knowledge so your library can be its most impactful. This informative guide teaches you how to strengthen your library's collections and services and develop your relationships with patrons by crowdsourcing ideas, support, and skills from your community. Citing success stories from libraries across the country, it also specifies tactics that will help you to serve specific demographic groups, including children, teens, and adults. You'll learn how to more exactly meet your patrons' needs by welcoming suggestions for improvements to your library. To raise money for special projects, you'll learn how to garner the necessary support; the author explains what types of funding campaigns are particularly suited to crowdsourcing and offers concrete steps for executing crowdfunding library initiatives. Moreover, you'll learn how to act as your community's documentarian by using crowdsourcing to gather and preserve community knowledge such as local history, providing your community with a reservoir of information from which it can draw for years to come.