Celebrating a Library Anniversary: Ideas, Activities, AND MORE!

Here’s a marketing tip I stumbled upon a long time ago, always add “and more!” If you don’t have an idea 100% formulated but you just need to get it out, “and more!” is your best friend. You should always deliver on the things you promise in your copy or write-ups, but “and more!” gives you a lot of room to breathe. So…that’s something they don’t teach you in library school 🙂

Anyway, our library celebrated it’s 125th anniversary last year, so I wanted to share some of the things that I made to celebrate and create awareness. I know that I was having trouble researching what others did, so wanted to make it a little easier for everyone else with this blog post.

Book Recommendations:

I love doing photos, plus I have a lot of costumes and hats from doing storytime, so I decided to dress up and recommend a book for every decade we’ve been through. I think I originally was going to read a story from every decade and do a storytime, but it’s definitely hard to get good picture books from the 1900’s. It was pretty simple and definitely a big hit on our Facebook page. I had a bunch of people come into the library that year and say “oh, you’re that guy that dresses up!” So definitely worth doing.

Logo Redesign:

The dress-up idea fed right into this one. Our director decided to change our logo the year of our anniversary, so I thought it would be a great idea to redesign our soon-to-be old logo to how it WOULD HAVE looked through out the decades. I did most of these in Publisher, but I’m sure you could also do it in something like Canva too. This didn’t get as much attention as the photos, but it was still really fun to do and get creative with.

Movie and Photo Collage:

Our library houses our village’s history room and records, so I was able to pull a bunch of old photos and news clippings. I posted them onto our Facebook page, along with some brief history, and there was A LOT of discussion and sharing of memories–people remembering how the library used to look or recognizing people from old photos. I had a lady from out of state comment about a black and white photo about a girl, apparently it was her in the photo, all grown up! So that alone is worth it, but it was also really easy to put it altogether in iMovie and do some voice over. I read our first news article published in 1897, all about our library opening, and it tied in so well with the photos.

Then and Now Photos:

This was another hit on Facebook. People loved seeing how the library has changed. It’s a big trend to recreate old family photos, so worked out really well to try and recreate some of our favorite library photos. And if you are making a movie, having “Then and Now” photos works really well for transitions.