Bizzle Ben - Start a revolution : stop acting like a library

True friends stab you in the front.

OSCAR WILDE

T HESE ARE THE people who inspire me, motivate me, challenge me, and keep me honest. Im not always an easy person to deal with, and these people love me anyway.

I need to begin by thanking Maria Flora for helping me organize all the jumbled thoughts in my head and teaching me how to write my voice. I could have never written this book without you. While there, I want to thank John Flora for loaning me his wife to work on this project. Also, thank you to Carson Block, Ned Potter, and Josh Tate for your contributions to this work. And thank you to Nancy Dowd for writing a foreword that makes me sound better than I could ever hope to be.

Thank you to Morgan Sallee for supporting and tolerating me during this process. You are a beautiful soul and Ill always love you. Thanks to my mom, Kathy Ray, for letting me vent my frustrations to her, and then offering her compassionate words of wisdom, Ben, quit whining and just finish the damn book. I finally finished it, mom. And a very special thank you to Joe Box, my best friend and partner in crime throughout this journey. You give me the courage to do things I probably shouldnt do.

Thank you to Brandi Hodges, Valerie Carroll, Melloney Dunlap, Micah Brightwell, Nina Darley, Wade Brightwell, and Sarah Stuart. You folks are the creative team. Im just the guy with the big mouth. Thank you to all of my coworkers at Craighead County Jonesboro Public Library. You are a family to me in a way you will never know. And you remind me that Im still just the guy who hasnt fixed your printer yet. I wrote this book, but you did this work. This is your book, not mine.

Thank you to all the people in the library industry who have been friends and inspirations to me: Carolyn Ashcraft, David Lee King, Sarah Houghton, Emily Clasper, Patrick Sweeney, J. P. Porcaro, John Chrastka, Kathy Dempsey, Janie Hermann, Rebekkah Smith Aldrich, Sue Considine, Stacie Ledden, Stephen Abram, Jane Dysart, Kevin Smith, Jenny Levine, Nicolette Sosulski, Nina McHale, and so many others I know Im leaving off. Id like to particularly thank Jeannie Allen for coming up with the idea of the Library Dropbox. Thank you to the members of ALA Think Tank. I admire the passion, brilliance, and commitment you show every day, as you share ideas and give of yourselves to make our industry better.

Finally, I want to thank David Eckert for fostering an environment of creativity and providing us with the security to fail with confidence. You are a true leader.

PRELUDE

WRITE A BOOK?

It was about 11:15 on the morning of Wednesday, October 24, 2012. Melloney Dunlap, our graphic designer at Craighead County Jonesboro Public Library, and I had just finished our first national presentation at the Internet Librarian conference in Monterey, California. Our presentation, Marketing on the Edge, was about the technology and marketing strategies we had implemented at our library. Wed gotten quite a bit of attention over the previous few months for our Meme Your Library ad campaign, a series of humorous posters, postcards, and billboards we created using the popular Internet eCard meme as a template. But well get to all of that later. Suffice it to say, the presentation went well. People really seemed to embrace the idea of using humor as an effective way for a library to engage the community.

As we were gathering our things, a few people came up to the stage to ask questions or comment on the presentation. Once everyone else had left to go to their next sessions, a woman approached and handed me her card, introducing herself as a representative for a publishing company. She asked if Id ever considered writing a book about the things wed just presented. Initially, I thought she was joking. Id been a wreck two hours earlier, letting my nerves get the better of me at the prospect of presenting in front of a few hundred people. I knew the presentation had gone pretty well, but the idea that anyone would actually want to read a book about our library just seemed ridiculous. So, naturally, I told her Id think about it.