We should all be fighting mad. I’m tired of reading headlines about the obsolescence of libraries and cuts to school programs. Librarians, students, parents, teachers, and community members—all of us should be incensed because our students deserve better. Now more than ever, libraries have become dynamic learning spaces where students develop information literacy skills, conduct research, collaborate, create, and read. It’s time to use the tools at our disposal to demand equity for students in our own districts and across the country. And we have to be willing to take matters into our own hands.

That’s just what students at La Escuela Fratney Elementary School in Milwaukee, WI, did this spring when faced with losing their librarian, Mayra Negron, due to budget cuts at state and district levels. With the inspiration of teacher Bob Peterson, Fratney students started the club “Rescue Our Librarians.” “Our club is about keeping libraries in schools,” says fifth-grader Anneke Knauss. “A library in school is a great place to be able to access books… Reading is a big part of learning and school, and we didn’t want schools to have that taken out of them. Our club helped parents, kids, and teachers realize how much libraries mean and why they should fight to keep them in schools.”

Along with their parents, Fratney students gathered petitions both in person and online; created the website “Save Our Librarians” and a Facebook group; got the word out on Twitter; spoke to the school board and principal; and met with U.S. Department of Education representative Alberto Retana, director of community outreach. Ultimately, a change in state funding and the students’ efforts helped save the librarian’s position. Other Milwaukee schools were not as fortunate and saw their library services slashed.

Illustration by Gary Hovland.

Rescue Our Librarians isn’t letting up. “It’s not fair if some schools have a librarian and others don’t,” explains Jalen Cross, a fourth grader at Fratney. “We want to help other students and schools to have their own librarians, too.” Expanding their efforts, the group is now circulating a petition asking President Obama and Congress to “fund libraries in all public schools.”

The incredible power of social networking drove this one local campaign, which has now gone national. And it was spearheaded by fourth and fifth graders.

With budgets threatened in schools nationwide, students, parents, and educators have begun to realize that they can’t wait around for state or national organizations to act. Web applications have made grassroots advocacy a lot easier, and homegrown efforts on behalf of libraries have sprung up across the country via blogs, wikis, Facebook, and Twitter. Even Google Maps has been pressed into service to show districts that have cut libraries and ones that have helped preserve them.

“When communities accept library closings as ‘the new normal,’ then all libraries are in trouble,” says Lori Reed, learning and development coordinator at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library in North Carolina.

Driven by layoffs in her own library community, Reed took action, launching the site SaveLibraries.org in March 2010. Here, “any library can have a voice and presence on the web,” says Reed. Because not every institution has the resources or staff to create a similar website, Reed says individual libraries can use SaveLibraries.org to promote their cause locally. “All they need to do is publish a link to their tagged posts.” (In other words, users add the tag “savelibraries” or “savelibs” to their posts and SaveLibraries.org will pick up the story.) Created with help from Heather Braum, technology librarian at the Northeast Kansas Library System, SaveLibraries.org collects user-submitted stories of library budget cuts and uses a variety of social networking tools to shed light on the crisis.

“Social media is where this conversation started,” says Braum, who volunteered to handle the technical end of the site. “Ultimately, the web tools make it easier to spread the message to a wider audience. Followers and fans immediately see the content and can share it with their friends.”

So what can you do if libraries are threatened in your district? You don’t have to launch a national or statewide campaign, but there are many powerful ways you and your constituents can leverage social networking tools to protect your local program.

Getting started

The American Library Association (ALA) and the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) offer great resources for those getting involved in advocacy. Visit the sites of both organizations to get started. Also worth joining: the Teacher Librarian Ning group on advocacy. So as not to reinvent the wheel, study up on the efforts of other schools and advocacy groups for ideas and inspiration; an easy way to learn about these efforts is to set up a Google alert, which can email related stories daily.

Once your advocacy plan is hatched, create a home base for your efforts, which could be a wiki, website, blog, or Facebook page. A central online space will help you mobilize supporters and enable them to connect with one another.

And don’t forget your personal connections. Whether you’re on Facebook, Twitter, email, in a book club, or part of the PTO, leverage your existing network for technical expertise or other support.

Refine your message

Make sure your message is clear, consistent, and focused on your students. Define how your library adds value on your campus. As Joyce Valenza and Doug Johnson advised in their SLJ article “Things That Keep Us Up at Night” (October 2009), determine the school library “brand,” and what makes a librarian different from other teaching specialists in the building. Know your value and articulate it within your community.

Lisa Layera Brunkan, one of the “Spokane Moms,” who led a statewide advocacy effort to support school libraries in Washington State, says, be specific about what you ask for. Do you want to restore hours for student access? Retain a full-time librarian at every school in your district for teaching information literacy? Maintain a focused message, and make sure your online advocacy reflects that. It’s also vital, Brunkan advises, to watch local politics, keeping in mind what efforts are appropriate and effective in your district.

Remember, this is all for and about your students (not about librarians). Just as every part of your daily work is about the kids, every bit of your advocacy should reflect how libraries serve them.

Connect with your audience

In preparing your approach, consider the varied concerns of your community, says Brunkan and fellow “Spokane Mom” Susan McBurney, who spoke at the Texas Library Association conference in April 2010. Your principal, for example, may be interested in test score data, your parents, in AP tests. Meanwhile, local employers may be concerned about job skills. It’s about the right message matched to the right audience.

Inspired by the Moms’ suggestion to build partnerships with a variety of constituencies, I reached out to local business leaders and college professors and asked them to comment on our library and the importance of research skills. With the source’s permission, I then placed selected quotes on the sidebar of our student website and uploaded them to photo-sharing site Flickr.

You can certainly involve students in supporting the library. Ask them to create their own word cloud on Wordle (an example) about what the library means to them, or use an easy tool like Wallwisher—an online bulletin board, of sorts—to post student comments about the library. Record video clips of student or parent testimonials and post them to YouTube.

Of course, you may encounter obstacles—filtered websites, limited time, or lack of familiarity with a tool. But if you aren’t willing to fight for your program, who else will?

If services have already been cut, keep on trying. Oftentimes, after a year without a librarian, the effects on the school become very clear. Think of advocacy as a long term effort—a marathon, rather than a sprint.

Taking action

Better yet, don’t wait until there’s a crisis to advocate for your program. You can create a great deal of visibility for what your library does well ahead of any crisis so that your community already understands what you do.

Here’s what you can do to make your library’s mission more visible in your community on an ongoing basis:

Create an online presence.

This can be a catchy name or logo that represents your library program, a brand, if you will. Buffy Hamilton, media specialist at Creekview High School in Canton, GA, for example, coined the “Unquiet Library.” Students can help in creating these logos/brands, too, which you can then use in all your materials, including your blog, email signature, etc.

Maintain a blog, Twitter account, or Facebook page.

Don’t wait for an advocacy campaign to begin using social media. Establish an online presence and use networks and other web tools with regularity to share news, video, and photos of library activities. Animoto, Slide.com, or VoiceThread, for example, are terrific for creating online slideshows. Create albums of your library on Flickr. Even if you aren’t allowed to post photos of students, you can share pictures of author visits, displays in the library, collaborative projects with classroom teachers, contests, and more. A nifty widget lets you insert Flickr sets directly onto your website.

Establish a communication network.

Leverage your Twitter or Facebook account to communicate with parents, students, and businesses in your community. If and when the time comes to rally supporters, you’ll already have your network in place. Reed experienced this firsthand when Charlotte Mecklenburg was threatened by cuts. “A communications and marketing staff person from the library tweeted from all of the board meetings, and staff followed along back at their branches,” says Reed. “Years ago, it might have taken a day for the board decisions to reach staff members, but now staff were aware of decisions the second they were made.”

Document what you do.

Assess your activities on a regular basis and share this information online. On National Library Snapshot Day, for instance, using PollDaddy.com, we embedded a simple survey on why students were using the library that day. For a longer view, create a multimedia, end-of-the-year report like Buffy Hamilton’s posted on SlideShare. Examples of other, equally creative library annual reports are collected on a wiki.

Ultimately, of course, it’s not so much about the tools, but the potential visibility they provide for libraries. The rest is up to us. In the words of fifth-grade activist Anneke Knauss: “Not only does our school need a library, but all schools everywhere should have a library.”

Carolyn Foote is the district and high school “techno” librarian at Westlake High School Research Center in Austin, TX.