1 Building Your Team It is often said that librarians (and, more broadly, library workers) wear many hats. However, one strength of the profession is the ability to collaborate—library workers do not wear these hats alone. Regardless of the size of your library, it is important to do work as a team because work- ing in a team allows a variety of opinions to be heard, engages your staff, builds community, and ultimately better serves both your users and team members. One study of academic librarians engaged in marketing activities found that some of the top challenges that librarians faced included a lack of funding, time, staffing, and resources in their work (Polger & Okamoto, 2013). By serving on a team and limiting the team’s energy to strategic pri- orities, you maximize your resources more efficiently. Teams can take many different formats—there is no one-size-fits-all tem- plate. Rather, team structures should be built based on the organization’s resources, workflows, and goals. Teams can be formal, meeting regularly with defined roles and a reporting structure, or informal, as in ad hoc groups that get together for a particular project. In many, if not most cases, it is appropriate to have a mix of both formal marketing teams and informal ad hoc teams. Even small libraries may want to consider having both an ongo- ing formal marketing team, for example, while allowing ad hoc teams to form for a particular purpose (a group that meets once to plan for and mar- ket Banned Books Week, for example). The point is to be purposeful about these teams, because working on them can take up a considerable amount of staff time and energy. This chapter will discuss the components of formal and informal marketing teams as well as the best practices in organizing and utilizing teams. Examples from the field demonstrate some of these best practices in action to give you some concrete, but diverse, examples of what successful teams look like. We begin here because what follows (the creation of marketing goals, materials, and assessment strategies) is dependent on a
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