“The moral of the story is, always check your spam folder,” directed Sara Day, the teen librarian for Woodland Public Library. “You never know who’s in there.” This might sound like questionable advice, but Day speaks from experience — in her spam folder a few months ago, a message from theObama Foundation lay buried underneath department store promotions and emails from hopeful hackers until she checked it on a whim. “At first, we were like, this has to be a joke. This can’t be real,” she said. “But we did a little research, and we realized it was.”
The foundation told the library that they could do “whatever we thought would highlight our library,” according to circulation director Sylvia Moreno.
“Obama was just, like, an added bonus,” Moreno said.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
