Elisabeth Doucett

A good introduction if this really is Step 1 in your approach to the whole branding thing. It provides a very light overview of the steps of the basic process of deciding on an approach, though it feels rather like it boils down to "once you know what you want, hire out." This is also most workable for a small public library that has more latitude in what they can do with their branding and when (or for library system directors, I guess). This isn't really for your everyday librarian who's show more trying to figure out how to make the library and its offerings stand out more.

The author occasionally makes nods towards other types of libraries, like academic libraries, but these are not explored, and we do have a very different structure to work with: at my college, we already have a style guide that affects what kind of branding we can do, and we're very limited in how we can stretch logos and taglines and things.

I did like Chapter 6 on defining your library's story and what your message is (my department leadership met last summer to try to settle on a vision statement, which was certainly a good amount of work). I flagged a few other places that had some helpful nuggets to keep in mind, but on the other hand, there were whole chapters I barely skimmed. show less

I'm glad I read this one. I found myself skimming some of the sections, but this book is probably worth a review after I'm through with school.

This book, written by a librarian (who had been a marketing manager for several large corporations) for librarians provides a nice basic introduction to branding, marketing and related concepts. It starts with taking your message and audience and uses that to create a Logo, and color scheme. From there it briefly refers to applying the branding to you message in web and print. Overall it provides an excellent introduction to branding from a libraries perspective. I didn't find it show more comprehensive enough to recommend it as the only resource, but considering the page count it does a surprisingly good job. show less

This book is for people who never worked at a library before, if you have then you know most of the odd ball things that come up and what you will be responsible for as a librarian. A lot of the examples are based on the author's business experience, not her librarian experience, it transfers over, but a little odd since its a book about librarianship.