The public portion of the effort kicked off in mid-September with an online survey that focused solely on whether SPL should change its name to “Seattle Public Libraries,” to better convey its “changing role of the library in the community,” according to SPL’s website on the proposed rebrand. Three logos with the proposed new name were offered, along with a new, suggested “brand statement.”
Ultimately, before the survey even closed, this process came up with the wrong message. Instead of the inclusivity the rebranding was intended to engender, City Librarian Marcellus Turner and his board of trustees have now rebranded themselves as being ignorant of the institution they oversee. Can you “Say WA”?
Not only did they think SPL needed rebranding in the first place — because not everyone knows what a library offers? — but according to an open letter written by the co-founders of The Seattle Review of Books, SPL didn’t extend its survey to anyone who didn’t have access to the Internet or spoke or read in a language other than English. This was despite SPL’s stated mission to engage more of the community.
And rather than using money to save valuable written resources within its physical and firewalls for knowledge-sharing and posterity, SPL is squandering it — albeit, donated money to the foundation — on developing a marketing strategy that doesn’t directly promote its services or programming. Of course, this doesn’t include the implementation expenses to come, which would cost at least an additional $570,000.
Of the more than 14,000 responses to the survey, 70 percent of the respondents said the proposed name change wouldn’t help the library “move forward as an essential part of the Seattle community.”
As many have argued in the ensuing weeks since the survey’s release, the money could have been better spent getting the resources people look for and use in a library: books, periodicals, computers and librarians. And with longer operational hours and more public computer access at its branches, patrons can do this more. That’s why voters passed a $123 million library levy to restore previously cut services and hours in 2012.
As a result of all the criticism SPL received from this rebranding initiative, the board voted down the name and logo change during its Oct. 28 meeting, but it opted to continue on with what it learned from the process.
Board member Tré Maxie said he was “somewhat disappointed” that two years of work had “been reduced to whether we should pluralize our name and change our logo.” But that was the point of the survey, as he and the other board members proved by not elaborating on what else they learned that could be used.
Maybe Turner and the board should read up on what “community” means to SPL patrons by asking them what brought them there in the first place and keeps them coming. That’s a more personal and free kind of rebranding help you can’t get anywhere else — not even from a book.