RA Outreach Slides and Upcoming ARRT Program Announcement

Last week I went to the ARRT program RA Outreach: Taking Books on the Road. Although I am on the Steering Committee for ARRT, I had nothing to do with this program and I had missed the March meeting where the details were unveiled so I was not prepared for how INSPIRING and USEFUL this program ended up being. I mean, I knew it would be good, but it was awesome.

I was one of the official live Tweeters during this event. For every program we use #ARRTreads but because I know that people encounter my posts in different time frames, I have also included this link which isolates only the Tweets for this program. Reminder, you do NOT have to have a Twitter account to see the conversation. You only need an account to participate.

There you will see, in reverse chronological order, the full conversation and revelations that happened at that program.

But you can also pair that Twitter discussion with the slides that Sarah and Sam graciously shared with us. They are posted here on the ARRT Programs page, where we post all of the links and handouts from past programs.

Pairing the twitter conversation and slides, you can recreate being there fairly well.  I should also point out that Sarah and Sam did a great job with their slides. They each had a lot of information about demographics and such that we needed to know in order for their presentations to make sense, so they made a few slides with all of that data and info. It was there for us to refer to, then and later, but also, freed them up from having to spend their presenting time going over it all.

[Side note/hint: if you want to see the live Tweets from another program, use the program page to figure out the date and then do a Twitter advanced search for #ARRTreads and make the date range from the day before to the day after. You can then pair that with the slides for that particular program.]

I was very energized to think about how my community could improve its RA outreach [and we already do a lot more than others]. In fact, I brought up something in Sarah’s brainstorming session during the presentation-- providing RA at the Friday night football games in our town. My high school football team is not very good but everyone comes out to support them. It is more about the hanging out as a community than the football. Why not have the library there? Other community groups bring a table and set up in the track. It’s well lit. There are plenty of power sources. We could bring books, do mobile circ, teach people how to download, etc.... Especially in the second half when there is less reason to stay and many of the people who came to support their kids in the halftime shows, leave.

Go look at the Tweets and the slides for yourself. It was a great program.

But now it is time to move on to the next one, and it features last year’s ARRT sponsored ILA RA Service award winner, Deborah Hoffman:

Hosting Author Events At Your Library
Tues, July 24, 1:00 – 3:00 PM
Warren-Newport Public Library

I unfortunately cannot make this one, but if you can, click here to sign up.

I do know that someone will be live Tweeting it and there will be slides, so I can recreate what happened in my absence.