2014 LibraryAware Community Award

Engaging Everyone In Town

2014 LibraryAware Community Award

Library Journal: 3.27.2014 by John N. Berry III

The Wichita Public Library (WPL), KS, has become a coalition builder for larger community goals. WPL signed on as an early “vision partner” with Visioneering Wichita, whose goal is to develop a strategic plan, through extensive community engagement, for the whole Wichita metropolitan area. Visioneering Wichita’s process identified six “foundations” that became the top priorities of the city, its leaders, its people, and its institutions and agencies. WPL committed its resources and staff to work to achieve these goals. The Friends of WPL were enlisted as well.

Over the decades, WPL had established a growing engagement with the city’s residents. The careful, constant watch of WPL director Cynthia Berner Harris—who has worked at WPL for 30 years, the last 14 in her current post—as well as the WPL board, Friends, leadership, and staff, had developed the libraries, services, and programs to meet newly surfacing opportunities and needs. The Visioneering Wichita process gave that long-standing community engagement specific goals and direction.

This reenergized engagement won for Wichita and its ­library the 2014 LibraryAware Community Award. The award is presented by Library Journal and funded by LibraryAware , a product of EBSCO Information Services’ NoveList Division. It carries a prize of $10,000.  READ MORE!

LibraryAware Community Award 2014 Honorees

Atlantic County Library System’s (ACLS) Brigantine branch was one of many libraries in communities damaged by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. In response, the library created the Sandy Stories Project (SSP), a feature film documenting the impact.

Kitsap Regional Library, Bremerton, WA

Jill Jean, Library Director

Kitsap Regional Library is “passionately, actively embedded in everything Kitsap County,” with more than 200 partnerships.

Criteria for the LibraryAware Community Award include any and all components that create a LibraryAware community: strategic planning, marketing, outreach, partnerships, and programs, product, or service development. The award emphasizes the library's engagement with the community its ability to make its community "aware" of what the library can do for it--and has delivered on that promise. This year, libraries were also required to include one letter of recommendation from a representative from local government such as a city manager.

About Library Aware

LibraryAware is a subscription service that enables libraries to reach their community through print, online, email and web channels. Uses for the LibraryAware program include a full range of marketing and communication channels including email blasts, e-newsletters, flyers, bookmarks, brochures, website inserts, letters, invitations, and social media.