Creating your Library Brand

Your brand needs to tell your story

At the start of the year we held a number of extended Library Team meetings to define our Library’s story and then visually convey this story via a new library logo and other branding elements. Technically, a brand is a mark, or logo, combined with specific colours and fonts that identifies a particular product or service to potential users. More generally, a brand is shorthand for the story that an organization wants to tell potential users about how it can meet a need in their lives. (Doucett, 2008)

What is your library's story?
What do you want to create in your library for the future?

Our Library story at Mt St Michael's College is told in the dot points below.

• We provide a welcoming space that engages students.
• We are information specialists who enable members of the College community to become creative and critical thinkers who use information effectively.
• We are innovators who stay informed about current trends in education.
• We equip students with the skills needed to actively participate in a digital world.
• We promote a positive reading culture and provide opportunities for users to engage in literature activities.

Once we had a clear story we needed to ensure that our logo or look clearly supported it.
The story and look had to work together. 

Our story can be summed up with four Cs - CONNECT, CELEBRATE, CREATE and CHALLENGE. All of these link together using the College colours and the four House colours.

New Library Logo

Library branding appears at the bottom of all marketing and promotional material.

We now use these 4 pillars for marketing purposes each term. 

In Term 1 we "branded" all our lunchtime activities with the theme of 

CONNECT TO YOUR LIBRARY

Students were asked to take a strip of coloured paper and write down one way in which they "Connect" to the MSM Library before attaching it to the chain.

This term we have changed our "branding" to MSM LIBRARY CELEBRATES

We have enjoyed creating these exciting and attention-grabbing ways to tell our story so that our clientele of staff and students cannot miss seeing and understanding it. 

Doucett, E. (2008) Creating your library brand : communicating your relevance and value to your patrons. Chicago, Illinois: American Library Association.