Myself and woodsiegirl (@woodsiegirl on Twitter) would like to look into how to move library advocacy on beyond the echo-chamber. That is to say, not just tossing good ideas around among ourselves, and not just preaching to the converted - but reaching the unconverted too.
Plenty has been talked about the image of librarians and libraries etc, but how do we go about addressing the misconceptions on a wider basis? At the moment, I reckon a very (very) crude representation of library advocacy might look a little like this:
The point being, the library skeptics aren't really being reached, and many of the excellent ideas we have are going into the echo-chamber of our own Information Professional community.
So we'd like to look into this further, and see what people think. Please use the comments below, or on Woodsiegirl's post, or particularly if you are on Twitter use the #echolib hash-tag, and let us know what you think. In particular:
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What is the current state of play?
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What can we do about it?
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Who are the shining lights who can lead us by example?
Let's try and get some debate going...
- thewikiman