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 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.

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