july08b.indd


Yunshan Ye 

The
Outreach
Symposium


A model of library collaboration 

Academic libraries today face the chal­lenge of finding effective ways to reach 
out to their patrons and promote the use and 
visibility of library resources and services. 
Given the strategic importance of outreach 
and marketing, three college libraries in Cen­
tral Pennsylvania—Dickinson, Gettysburg, 
Franklin and Marshall—decided to collaborate 
and create a platform for library profession­
als in the region to come together and share 
ideas and experiences. The goal was to help 
each participating library upgrade its outreach 
programs and provide more effective services 
to its college community. 

The result was a library symposium entitled 
“Outreach Solutions for College Libraries,” co­
hosted by the three libraries and held on the 
campus of Dickinson College on April 25, 2007. 
The event attracted 61 participants from 24 
college and research libraries in Pennsylvania. 
The highlights of the event included a keynote 
speech by Diana Vogelsong, acting university 
librarian of American University; a panel of 
library patron representatives; and seven presen­
tations on various themes of library outreach and 
marketing (“outreach to students,” “outreach to 
faculty,” “community outreach,” and “outreach 
to multicultural population”). 

The symposium received overwhelmingly 
positive feedback from the participants. Besides 
the stimulating presentations and discussions, 
it was also commended for its well­balanced 
program, well­coordinated activities, and me­
ticulous attention to details. The purpose of this 
paper is to share our experience in organizing 
this successful library event. 

The planning 
A tri­library collaboration 
Early in the fall of 2006, a planning committee 

was formed to develop a program on library 
outreach and marketing. Headed by Yunshan 
Ye (Dickinson College), the committee con­
sisted of four librarians from Dickinson College 
(Yunshan Ye, Theresa Arndt, Ann Margaret 
Thompson, and Maureen O’Brien Dermott), 
two from Gettysburg College (Cinda Gibbon, 
Kerri Odess­Harnish), and one from Franklin 
and Marshall College (Lisa Stillwell). 

The collaborative nature of the project lent 
itself naturally towards funding from the Cen­
tral Pennsylvania Consortium (CPC), a regional 
consortium whose mission is to “combine 
[local] resources” to create “opportunities for 
interaction and mutual support” among the 
member institutions (Dickinson, Gettysburg, 
and Franklin and Marshall).1 CPC quickly ap­
proved funding for the tri­library collaborative 
project. With funding secured, the planning 
committee lost no time in moving the project 
forward. 

Over the next six months, the commit­
tee convened four times in preparation for 
the event, in addition to numerous e­mail 
communications. All seven members of the 
planning committee worked closely together 
over each step of the planning process, from 
brainstorming for program ideas, soliciting and 
selecting the keynote speaker and presenters, 
to finalizing the program and publicizing the 
event. 

The most challenging part of the planning 
process was to stay on top of the sprawling de­
tails that the project involved. Besides working 
on the project, we all carried our full load of 
usual job responsibilities. As we moved closer 

Yunshan Ye is liaison librarian at Dickinson College, e-
mail: yey@dickinson.edu 
© 2008 Yunshan Ye 

C&RL News July/August 2008  408 

mailto:yey@dickinson.edu


to the final event date, our work became in­
creasingly more detailed and multifaceted, and 
consequently, more demanding. To ensure 
everything was on track, we created to­do lists 
for each stage of the planning process, and the 
committee chair sent out updates to everyone 
periodically. We also created a shared network 
account to document all major decisions and 
carefully preserve the paper trial to avoid pos­
sible miscommunication. 

In retrospect, the well­orchestrated effort of 
the planning committee, besides the hard work 
of each member, was the most crucial to the 
success of the collaborative project. 

The Program2 
Looking for dialogue and conversation 
What made our symposium a unique ex­
perience was our explicit goal of creating a 
seminar­style platform to promote information 
sharing. We were not just looking for a few 
presentations of outreach ideas, but wanted 
to generate genuine dialogue and conversa­
tion among all participants (presenters and 
attendees alike). Given the practical nature 
of the topic, we believed that everyone could 
contribute something to the conversation, and 
that a well­structured, stimulating conversation 
would be the best way to maximize the rich­
ness of the symposium. 

With this specific goal and format in mind, 
we called for “conversationalists rather than 
talkers” in our Call for Submissions. We evalu­
ated proposals based in part on their potential 
to engage the audience. In our subsequent 
communications with selected presenters, we 
stressed time and again the conversational 
nature of the event, and urged them to come 
up with creative strategies to draw in the audi­
ence. Finally, to allow as much discussion time 
as possible, we limited each 75­minute session 
to no more than two presentations. 

The program itself consisted of two parts: 
morning and afternoon sessions. The objec­
tive of the morning sessions was to contex­
tualize outreach. The keynote speech by 
Diana Vogelsong aimed at providing a larger, 
overarching framework for the entire event. 
Vogelsong’s hour­long talk, entitled “Would 

you recommend your library to a friend? Out­
reach and marketing to make a difference,” 
started with the question, “Why emphasize 
marketing and outreach?” Quoting from an 
OCLC report on college students’ percep­
tions of libraries and information resources,3 

Vogelsong reviewed the environmental 
changes (including the changes of “lifestyle” 
of a new generation of college students) and 
pressures in the information and communi­
cation arenas (such as “Googlization”) that 
make library focus on outreach an imperative. 
Vogelsong’s theoretical discourse on principles 
of outreach was enlivened and made concrete 
with examples of her experience at the Ameri­
can University Library, an award­winning 
library that had gained national recognition 
for its outstanding outreach and marketing 
practices.4 

Following the keynote was a panel of li­
brary patrons, including two faculty members, 
one community member, and two students 
(all from Dickinson College). The panel was 
designed to provide another kind of context 
or grounding for all this talk about outreach: 
the library patron perspective. Prompted by 
questions from the facilitator and from mem­
bers of the audience, the panelists offered 
their opinions about the importance of the 
library as a physical place (a central place 
to meet and discuss), and about issues of 
advertising library services to the college and 
local community (be more visible). Both the 
faculty and students expressed the wish that 
librarians should get out of the library building 
more often and have more interaction with 
the campus community (“Be more human,” 
as one student put it). 

The afternoon breakout sessions included 
four tracks on different outreach topics (out­
reach to “faculty,” “students, “community,” 
and “multicultural population”). For each 75­
minute time slot, we had two tracks running 
concurrently. The presenters were given full 
authority and responsibility to run the show. 
The seven presentations in the breakout ses­
sions introduced fresh, practical ideas and 
some of the most innovative solutions to 
common outreach challenges. 

July/August 2008  409 C&RL News 



For example, Margaret Montet and Linda 
McCann’s (Bucks County Community College) 
presentation, “Outreach to Faculty via the In­
formation Literacy Institute,” tackled a major 
challenge facing academic librarians today, 
namely, how to “sell” information literacy to 
the teaching faculty and foster campus­wide 
faculty­librarian collaboration. 

Montet and McCann’s presentation dem­
onstrated how they accomplished this by 
successfully incorporating their information 
literacy program into their college strategic 
plan, thus securing institutional support and 
funding, by gaining crucial support from key 
faculty, and last but not least, through their 
own creative programming that made the 
two­and­a­half­day workshop (the Informa­
tion Literacy Institute) not only educational 
but also fun. 

Another example of innovative program­
ming was the “outreach to students” presenta­
tion by Bonnie Imler and Michelle Tomaszeski 
(Pennsylvania State University­Altoona). Imler 
and Tomaszeski described their experience 
of taking library services out of the library to 
where the students were—the campus sex fair! 
“Sex on Campus” was a popular annual event 
at the university. Seeing this as a good oppor­
tunity to reach out to students, the librarians 
at Altoona were undaunted by the fact that 
the library was not invited, and volunteered 
to staff a booth at the fair. 

In addition to a display of sex­related books 
and library materials, the library booth also 
offered a variety of giveaways and entertain­
ing activities. Among them were free condom 
packages labeled with the library slogan, 
“Facts You Need Between the Covers,” and an 
interactive sex trivial quiz via a Flash movie. 
Both the condoms and sex quiz turned out 
to be tremendously popular. Students came 
in groups to take the quiz and compete with 
each other, and they walked away with stick­
ers that said, “I am sex savvy.” Hundreds of 
condoms were given out at the booth. Some 
faculty took the condoms back to their offi ces 
and stuck them on their bulletin boards, which 
led other faculty to call the library if there were 
more “library condoms” left. In the end, the 

“bold move” by the Pennsylvania State­Altoona 
librarians brought a lot of approachability and 
visibility points for the library, and a good 
laugh for everyone. 

Outcome 
Feedback from the audience 
Thirty­five attendees filled out the evaluation 
forms, representing more than 58 percent of all 
participants. Judging from the evaluations, by 
far the majority of participants felt that the day 
was “well organized” and they had a “fantastic 
time” learning new ideas and networking with 
colleagues from other institutions. Many said 
that they were deeply impressed by the “very 
innovative [outreach] strategies” presented in 
Vogelsong’s keynote speech, and felt “excited 
by the variety of creative possibilities.” 

Most participants also found that the library 
patron panel was a “good idea—fi rst panel 
of its kind.” They felt that the panelists were 
“very insightful,” and said that it was great to 
hear “the diverse perspectives.” The afternoon 
breakout sessions were also highly rated. 
Most attendees found the presentations and 
discussions “very interesting and informative,” 
and they loved the “good, practical ideas,” as 
well as the “interaction between panelists and 
audience.” 

The only complaint on the evaluation 
forms was about the symposium site. We had 
arranged to have the entire event (except for 
lunch) in one building, which was an audi­
torium sectioned off into rooms of different 
sizes. We thought it was a great idea because 
it would make it easy and convenient to move 
people from one session to another, and 
save time for socializing over breaks. What 
we failed to anticipate was the noise issue 
when two concurrent sessions were taking 
place in adjacent rooms (with a movable 
wall in between). In addition, the physical 
setting of the auditorium was not conducive 
to the seminar­style discussion that we had 
envisioned. 

Another issue some attendees raised was 
that the agenda for the one­day event was 
too packed, leaving little room for prolonged 
discussions or activities outside the agenda. 

C&RL News July/August 2008  410 



Conclusion 
Our recommendations 
Based on our experience in organizing the 
outreach symposium, we would like to make 
the following recommendations for anyone 
interested in hosting a similar collaborative 
library event: 

• Choose a topic that grows naturally out 
of your work. Chances are that if you encoun­
ter a persistent issue in your work, colleagues 
in other (similar) institutions may very well be 
concerned about the same thing. The shared 
need to learn will naturally draw people to­
gether and make a successful conference. 

• Get support from the administrators 
from the very beginning. Don’t hesitate to 
share your idea, even in its rudimentary stage, 
with your supervisor and/or administrator. 
Institutional support is really fundamental in 
organizing a professional event. You need to 
make sure you have that support before any 
real work starts. 

• Organize a team that shares your inter­
est and passion. For the planning committee, 
you will need a group of people who are 
genuinely interested in the project, who are 
committed to the work and ready to contrib­
ute, who are open­minded and fl exible. Good 
teamwork is the key to success. 

• Try your best to secure external funding. 
Organizing an event can be costly. It is not 
realistic to expect your institution to foot the 
bill. Get as much outside funding as you can. 
If necessary, it is absolutely okay to disperse 
some of the expenses to participants. 

• Document everything along the way. 
Once you start the planning process, be sure 
to create a centralized location (a shared 
network account, for instance) for all the 
documentation. 

• Set realistic goals for your event. If we 
could redo our event, we would probably 
be less ambitious and have a more focused 
agenda. A less packed schedule would al­
low more flexibility for contingencies and 
make it less stressful for both organizers and 
participants. 

• Find a facility best tailored to your need 
and purpose. In our case, a roundtable con­

ference room would be a better choice than 
the auditorium, especially for the breakout 
sessions. 

• Get as many colleagues involved as 
possible. To run an event smoothly, you will 
need as much help as possible. For our event, 
we were very fortunate to have many of our 
colleagues on board. They volunteered as fa­
cilitators, note­takers, registration/information 
table staff, and library tour guides between 
and after the sessions. All this no doubt added 
to the overall satisfaction of the participants 
in their symposium experience. 

Hosting a collaborative library event is 
challenging, and most rewarding. At the end 
of the day, all our committee members found 
great satisfaction and pride in what we had 
accomplished. It took the hard work of a 
dedicated team, plus collaboration of all three 
institutions and their members, to make our 
symposium a great success. 

The attendees’ feedback clearly testifi es 
to the remarkable result of this collective 
effort. In this sense, the symposium exem­
plifi es the potential and meaning for library 
collaboration, and what a difference we 
can make to our institutions and profession, 
and ultimately, to the communities that we 
serve, when we come together and work 
as a team. 

Notes 
1. Central Pennsylvania Consortium, 

“Mission Statement” is at alpha.dickinson. 
edu/prorg/cpc/. 

2. This part has drawn from notes by the 
five note­takers: Cinda Gibbon (Gettysburg), 
Chris Bombaro (Dickinson), Malinda Triller 
(Dickinson), Mark Wardecker (Dickinson), 
and Kate Pettegrew (library intern at Dick­
inson). 

3. OCLC, “College Students’ Perceptions of 
Libraries and Information Resources,” www. 
oclc.org/reports/perceptionscollege.htm. 

4. ACRL, “2005 Best Practices in Market­
ing Academic and Research Libraries @ your 
library® Award Winners,” www.ala.org/ala 
/ a c r l / a c r l i s s u e s / m a r k e t i n g y o u r l i b  
/marketingwinners.htm. 

July/August 2008  411 C&RL News 

www.ala.org/ala