OK – one more post from Internet Librarian. I attended a session … I don’t remember who talked or what the talk was about, really.
Because I got stuck on this. One of the presenter’s many points (really more of a side point) was this: libraries aren’t content creators.
I’d strongly disagree with that. How about you?
Let’s count the ways libraries and librarians ARE, in fact, content creators. At my library, we create gobs of content, including:
- blog posts
- The rest of the website. All those pages. With words. And images.
- social media posts
- press releases
- posters advertising events
- weekly e-newsletter
- Annual community novels – we write the intros, the outline, and some of the chapters.
- bi-monthly print newspaper, mailed to 47,000 households
- catalog records!
- tipsheets
- videos
- content for classes, events, and seminars
- internal Intranet posts
- emails. Those count, right?
- RFPs, resolutions, executive briefs
- etc.
I think we make a bit of content, don’t you?
The speaker was an academic librarian. I’m just guessing here, but … LibGuides (used by many academic libraries) are content. Presentations, bibliographic instruction, handouts … content. Special collections archives and digitization? Content. All the words describing all the services and stuff? Content.
Heck – the speaker’s presentation … was content!
Moral of the story: don’t ever let a librarian say we aren’t content creators. Because we totally are.
Photo by Rebecca
I think I must’ve been in that session (although I also can’t remember who it was) because I remember thinking that that statement didn’t really ring true. We may not create the books or the DVDs or the journals (although librarians do obviously write articles and even books) but we do certainly create other types of content for our libraries.