Casually Yours

Finished March 23

Casually Yours by Vivian Jia Lac

This debut by Toronto writer Vivian Jia Lac is a winner. Set partly in Manhattan and partly in Oregon, the main character is only child Dani Tsai. Dani grew up in small town Silverpine, Oregon, in a house she and her father moved to after her mother returned to Taiwan to pursue her artistic career. Next door lived the Trans, a warm and rambunctious family who ran a local pharmacy. Their son Parker was the same age as Dani and the two became unlikely best friends. Parker was popular at school, always into sports, and became a local football star in high school. Dani was bookish, artistic, introverted, and has a passion for the idea of parallel worlds. Their families spent holidays together from the Fourth of July to Thanksgiving. Parker's mom, Cô Tran, was like a mother to her, much appreciated with the absence of her own mother. Parker's older brother Nathan went to university in Philadelphia and ended up settling there.

When they went to college, they went in opposite directions: Parker to the University of Oregon on a scholarship and later to San Francisco, and Dani to New York City. They stayed in touch until Christmas their sophomore year. Parker was supposed to come to New York for Christmas, but didn't show and basically ghosted her, refusing to respond to her, or even discuss what happened and why. 

Dani works for a magazine, Adagio, as a copy editor, but often writes freelance articles for it and other publications as well. She gets along with her co-workers for the most part and, as the book opens is looking forward to an interview for an online publication, for a contract 18-month position travelling through Asia, something her boss has already approved as a side gig as long as she meets her deadlines. 

After the dinner interview goes drastically wrong, Dani runs into Parker, in town for work as a sports marketing specialist, and the two reconnect. He even invites her to a gala his company is co-sponsoring that weekend. There, the evening takes a turn neither one planned for. 

Their casual relationship takes off from there. Regular meetups at his hotel suite and soon more. But whether it will last past his current New York-based assignment or not is unclear, and insecurities abound.

 I enjoyed the connection between the two characters, built from their past friendship, but with added passion. Shared memories, plus now secrets that just they know. Lac is great at characterization, and her dialogue is perfect. I got a good sense of even the less major characters of friends and family. A definite winner and an author I'll be looking for again. 

Marketing Your Library's Electronic Resources

Finished January 4
Marketing Your Library's Electronic Resources by Marie R. Kennedy and Cheryl LaGuardia

This marketing how-to-do-it manual is actually a general marketing manual with some good examples specific to electronic resources. The manual begins with a short backgrounder of the environment and the obstacles to awareness of libraries' digital resources.
Chapter one then begins with the marketing basic of defining your purpose. Knowing what you want to accomplish with your marketing plan is key to achieving it. It emphasizes the importance of engaging with library patrons, because after all they are the users and potential users of your resources. It talks about the challenge of not having physical resources to browse, the need to have all staff on the same page when it comes to messaging,
Chapter two outlines the components of a marketing plan. It uses the image of a circle to show the marketing cycle and defines nine components to any good marketing plan.
Chapter three moves into implementation of the plan giving examples of each component in action, There is a nicely laid out table of different marketing techniques as applied to marketing e-resources, as well as four main categories these fall into.
Chapter four discusses the written marketing plan report. Creating a report can be done at various points from before to after your campaign, but is an important element for various stakeholders. The report needs to be geared to the audience,
Chapter five looks at assessment. How effective was your marketing plan? Did it meet your stated purpose? As they say, assessment is not a one-time measure, it is ongoing through the life of the plan. Feedback is essential and many examples are given here of feedback forms for different purposes. There is also a list of questions library staff must ask themselves in terms of assessment.
Chapter six looks at revising and updating your marketing plan, the importance of reflection. Reflect on each of the nine components, how well they worked for you, and what you might do differently.
The second part of the book gives four marketing plans. One is for an all-electronic library, two are for public libraries, and the fourth is for an academic library.
This book provides very useful information for libraries looking at developing marketing plans.

Successful Social Networking in Public Libraries

Finished August 9
Successful Social Networking in Public Libraries by Walt Crawford.

This book examines the use of social networking sites by public libraries, mostly in the United States, and is based on research and surveys. Crawford examines the definition of success in this context looking at reach, frequency of posts, currency of content, interaction with the community and republishing of posts by community members. As he says, "it's working if you think it is". He groups libraries into categories by the size of their community.
Most of the libraries used either Facebook or Twitter, or both of these social networking tools. While he makes mention of other social networking communities, the focus is on these two platforms. For each of Facebook and Twitter, he looks at what successful posts look like, and how to strategically aim for similar successes for your library. He talks about the importance of each individual library examining what their purpose is in using a social media platform, and examining whether it is the best use of that platform.
He has a nice section on best practices. These include: have a personality, ask questions and interact, act like a person, make your followers feel like the in-crowd, keep an eye on what the most people interact with, and expand to other platforms.
Crawford talked about the challenges of his research, and how he went about gathering information. There is a chapter that goes through his research results for each state he has data from (38), giving a snapshot of the statistics and sample posts.
He ends with a chapter looking to the future. As he says, this book is a snapshot in time, with posts over approximately a four month period in 2011. Things change a lot in a short time, and he foresees the increase in use of social media as well as talking about the measure of success for libraries in terms of effort versus output.

The Power of Habit

Finished June 23
The Power of Habit: why we do what we do and how to change it by Charles Duhigg

This fascinatiing book looks at the nature of habits, explaining how habits work, why habits never really go away (but can be changed), and what goes on in our brains around them.
The basic structure of habits is the habit loop. Some sort of cue leads us to a routine or habit, that leads us to some sort of reward. The chapter on creating new habits led me to begin a habit I'd been unsuccessful at instilling in myself until now, flossing my teeth daily. I decided to start with this simple habit, and see how well this habit creation worked before starting some other, potentially more difficult, habits. I've found it worked very well. It also talks about how bad habits can be replaced with new, better habits.
The book doesn't only look at personal habits, it also looks at habits in terms of organizations, and in terms of society. It shows us how corporations use the study of people's habits in influence marketing and directed marketing to increase purchase of products. It also shows how societies are influenced, and changed by habits and by sudden changes in habits.
There is an appendix that walks the reader through the process of identifying the routine, reward and cue to a habit you want to change, and how to effect that change.
Just knowing how habits work and how others try to influence our habits can make us less susceptible to that influence. Awareness of both the process and one's own habitual behaviours is the first step in making changes.

Old Spice Guy for Libraries

Business Book

Finished May 31
You Are What You Choose: the habits of mind that really determine how we make decisions by Scott de Marchi and James T Hamilton
The book looks at TRAITS, a different way of profiling someone by the choices they make and predicting future behaviour from that. I enjoyed the background information and the sample test (Of course I had to take it. Among other things I am an information geek, there's a surprise). I found the case studies of behaviour a bit dry, with too much repetition. I can see that it is definitely a useful system, but gathering the information wouldn't always be so easy.