Teens

Hoopla Holiday Collection Promotion

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The thing about holiday collections in libraries is that for the one month of the year that they are featured, they are in such high-demand that our shelves clear out. (An excellent problem to have!) So how do we supplement our physical collections with available holiday content? Answer: hoopla!

Unlike other digital collections, hoopla materials are always available. When staff direct patrons to the resource, we can rest assured that the suggested title we recommend will be there. And fortunately, hoopla makes it even easier to recommend titles with curated holiday collections!

From Halloween to Christmas, hoopla supplies curated content to fit the needs and whims of library patrons of all ages. Not only does hoopla provide quality content in convenient collections, but they also offer marketing tools & social media assets to make it easy to promote to your patrons!

hoopla holiday marketing tools

The holiday promo tools include flyers, social media images, and links to Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas & holiday Bonus Borrows collections. There is even a link to examples of library social media posts to make your library’s promotions that much easier!

Find the links for posters, Facebook, Instagram & Twitter graphics next to each collection.
Go ahead and stick printed flyers out with your physical holiday collections to promote these always available collections!

I personally enjoy the digital catalog of holiday collections on hoopla. Brings me back to flipping through holiday store catalogs as a child and circling all of the toys I wanted, but now it’s all the books and movies I want to check out. It even links directly to the content in hoopla, making it a one-stop-shop! You can share the link to the catalog directly with your patrons in your social posts or on your website.

Need more promo ideas? Head to the hoopla resources page for additional marketing tools & assets. They provide a vast array of promo materials for any time of year. And don’t forget to scroll to the bottom of the page because there is a ton of info there, too! I find the Quarter Assets to be especially helpful because they highlight timely themes (e.g. Cookbook Month in October, National Native American Heritage Month in November, etc.)

hoopla resources page

So when your holiday shelves are looking bare, know that the hoopla holiday collection is there for you & your patrons!

Richelle – Sewickley Public Library

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World Book Online

It’s back to school time and World Book Online is here to help! The database offers separate interfaces and content written for elementary, middle grades, and high schoolers/adults.

World Book’s search results feature images, encyclopedia articles, reports and more. Since citations are a key part of research, World Book Student contains a Quick Link to a helpful Citation Builder. World Book Kids contains games and activities that provide educational information about a variety of topics. There’s also a “For Grown-ups” link that features a number of lesson plans with accompanying student lessons.

With such a wide variety of content, World Book Online is sure to have something for everyone this school year.

Erin Weaver- Bridgeville Public Library

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Anatomy of a Big Library Read

Remember the Big Library Read?  It’s OverDrive’s “global ebook club.”  Offered several times a year for a two week period, the Big Library Read offers unlimited simultaneous access to a specific title.  This time the selected title will be displayed prominently on our OverDrive site(s) from Oct. 13 – 28, 2014.

The latest Big Library Read comes just in time for Teen Read Week, a national adolescent literacy initiative created by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA).  Teen Read Week, running from Oct. 12 – 18th, “began in 1998 and is held annually during the third week of October. Its purpose is to encourage teens to be regular readers and library users.”  Fittingly, the upcoming Big Library Read features a YA title, Anatomy of a Misfit by Andrea Portes.

anatomyofamisfitAccording to the annotation on our OverDrive site: In this Mean Girls meets The Perks of Being a Wallflower tale, narrator Anika Dragomir is the third most popular girl at Pound High School. But inside, she knows she’s a freak; she can’t stop thinking about former loner Logan McDonough, who showed up on the first day of tenth grade hotter, bolder, and more mysterious than ever. Logan is fascinating, troubled and off-limits. The Pound High queen bee will make Anika’s life hell if she’s seen with him. So Anika must choose–ignore her feelings and keep her social status? Or follow her heart and risk becoming a pariah. Which will she pick? And what will she think of her choice when an unimaginable tragedy strikes, changing her forever? An absolutely original new voice in YA in a story that will start important conversations–and tear at your heart.

Anatomy is already available as an ebook (Kindle, EPUB, and OverDrive Read formats) on our site following the single copy/single user model. The audiobook will become available during the Big Library Read program.  Remember, during those two weeks (Oct. 13 – 28) both formats will be available for unlimited simultaneous use.  After the program both formats will continue to be available, but will revert to the single copy/single user model.

teenreadingroomWe’ll also be launching our new Teen eReading Room just in time for this YA-focused Big Library Read.  You may have noticed that this new specialized site is already available from our main OverDrive site via a graphic (at left).  We’re working on getting a direct link to this site up on the countywide eResources page and various CLP pages.  In the meantime, you can let patrons know about this new site and encourage them to access it from our main OverDrive site.

For those of you who link directly to e-resources, please add the new Teen eReading Room where appropriate.  You can find the graphic above, as well as individual graphics for the Kids eReading Room and Teen eReading Room by accessing the eReading Room Marketing Kit.  You’ll also find additional promotional materials such as Facebook graphics and print-ready materials.

If you want to promote the Big Library Read there is a Marketing Kit for that too!

Charmaine (CLP)

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