As I’m sure all of you are aware, next week is the 50th anniversary National Library Week. In addition to the personal, local events that many of you are planning (and please let us know about them in the comments!), ALA and others in our community have delivered a bookmobile full of celebratory happenings for the week.
I’ll highlight specific resources and activities later in the post, but right now I’ve got to tell you how excited I am about the wacky-good promotional Library Week videos you can download from the AL Focus site.
These videos turn normally stale library stats (“Reference librarians in the nation’s public and academic libraries answer more than 7.2 million questions weekly“) on their ear. I mean, where else are you going to find a video campaign that combines romance novels and vending machines, brings literature and Johnny Depp to the McDonalds Drive-in window, stumps viewers with the really important reference questions, and takes them inside a high-stakes game of ID-card Go Fish.Genius!The shelf life of this campaign is sure to extend well beyond next week and should make for clever marketing videos for the entire year. Instructions are available for downloading and embedding. You are even invited to use the the animated intro as a lead-in to your own library cinematic creation. Let us know if you make one!
All right, on to the rest of the week’s goodies. Individual events for the week include:
- Monday: Submit your library star nominee
- Tuesday: National Library Workers Day
- Thursday: YALSA Support Teen Literature Day
- Friday: Library Gaming Day (Gaming @ Your Library)
And a smattering of resources to help you plan your events:
- ALA National Library Week Fact Sheet (and don’t forget the Julie Andrews promos)
- Who needs the Public Library video via WebJunction
- Lesson Plans, Projects and Resources from Education World
- Library Week Activity Page at I Love Libraries
- Library Postal Art History
- Chicagoist Blog Celebrates Libraries
- Special Library Celebration Ideas from WJ-Illinois
- National Library Week South Africa from “It’s All Good“
- Inspirational ideas for children
As the week goes on this list should get even more rich thanks to all the nuggets you’ll submit via comments (You are planning to comment, aren’t you?), your blog posts out there on the interweb, your ticklish, snippet-filled tweets (I’m thinking “#NatLibWk08″ hashtag could work), and so on.
And if it turns out that a whole week still doesn’t allow enough time to get your library groove on, you can relax— you’ve got more time. April is School Library Media Month. Phew! I think LibraryLand has us Aries covered.
Do you have something fun planned for National Library Week? As always, let us know here in the comments or in the National Library Week discussion thread on WebJunction.