Book Reviews

Sally Gardner Reed. The Good, the Great, and the Unfriendly: A Librarian’s Guide to Working with Friends Groups. Chicago: American Library Association, 2017. 157p. Paper, $57.00 (ISBN: 978-0838914984).

Librarians can be a discerning and, at times, impossible audience to please. We read widely and voraciously, in print and online, in every genre and format: books, blogs, newspapers, social media posts, Sunday flyers, you name it. Librarians also claim a sort of superpower that authorizes us to distinguish between appropriate formats. We might agree that, in most cases, an online search delivers decent and convenient information. Despite that, most librarians still maintain an awareness (and appreciation) of print-only sources for instruction, research, and professional guidance. For those of us working with rural or elderly populations, in communities with an abundance of low and moderate income households, or in deeply academic and historical fields, print sources might win the day. Books written for librarians then, particularly guides and manuals, walk a precarious path. In this day and age, does a narrowly focused manual need to exist in print? Especially one aimed at an expert audience with deep familiarity of the competing online sources? Sally Gardner Reed’s slim book, The Good, the Great, and the Unfriendly: A Librarian’s Guide to Working with Friends Groups is well aware of these hazards and works hard to present current information to a shrewd audience who knows whether to Google a solution or to look for one in the pages of a book.

Reed’s expertise and professional experience are formidable. She has been publishing books and leading organizations focused on library friends groups, fundraising, and community advocacy for three decades. Her earlier books, like Making the Case for Your Library: A How-To-Do-It Manual from 2001, or her 2004 guidebook, 101+ Great Ideas for Libraries and Friends: Marketing, Fundraising, Friends Development, and More predate iPhones, Facebook, and blogs as we know them. Her publishing oeuvre (that is, manuals and textbooks tailored specifically to public and academic library directors) was born in a print-based world of textbooks and how-to manuals. She describes these “good ol’ days” in the opening pages of her book, recounting a simpler library, before online catalogs and digital resources. It was “easy peasy!” Reed exclaims, to deliver library services before things got complicated. As the cost of operating a library increased, and as social and economic inequalities deepened, the historical funding sources for libraries—like taxpayer funds, government allocations, or institutional commitments—fell short of the library’s goals to remain at the social and intellectual center of its community or campus. Friends groups materialized to bridge this gap, and Reed divides her book into three main sections to help build and maintain these relationships.

The first section consists of several instructional chapters, written with humor and pep, a tone balanced between a breezy blog and an Instagram post. Phrases like, “You can do this!” and, “You gotta have friends!” are meant to make the delicate and diplomatic work of navigating volunteers and donors seem effortless and trouble-free. This cheerful language belies the hard work Reed is well aware of. In chapter 5, “When Friends Go Rogue,” the author announces straightaway: “I feel your pain!” and then candidly shares careful steps to improve relations. These recommendations add serious value to the book. Frank descriptions of cliquish, elderly, or frugal donors are not for the faint of heart, and readers with experiences in the public or academic library world will find a familiar scenario or two, even up to the breaking point, a section titled, “Getting a Divorce from Your Friends.” To be sure, if I were to find myself in an irretrievably broken professional relationship with a donor or friends group, I would prefer the close-and-personal pages of this book over a Web search.

Chapters like “How to Start a Friends Group (and Why You Should)” and “Engaging Active New (and Younger) Friends” cover straightforward topics like adopting bylaws and recruiting members. Both academic and public librarians will find wise counsel throughout the book, since the author makes an effort to describe the unique challenges that various generations bring to library volunteerism. Older volunteers are being replaced by baby boomers (Americans born between 1946 and 1964), who are being joined by younger volunteers in their 30s and 40s. Millennials (20- and 30-somethings born between 1981 and 1996) and teenagers appear in these pages too. Each generation, according to the author, brings unique implications and opportunities for advocacy, volunteerism, and fundraising. Quoting a 2015 Bureau of Labor Statistics study, Reed notes that volunteer rates of 20- to 24-year-olds are the lowest in the country. This fact might bode ill for librarians working with traditional undergraduate populations; fortunately, our alumni fall into every generation. Reed emphasizes creativity and professionalism, and urges her readers to reimagine and revitalize friends groups and donors. She closes one of her chapters with this declaration: “Try some new projects that might have appeal to students and the baby boomer generation, nurture your relationships, and then go get them!” For readers who lack Reed’s pluck, the final chapter, “Ideas to Steal—Taking Your Friends from Good to Great,” offers more than 60 pages (nearly half the book) of program ideas. Despite the fact that a Google search for the phrase “Ideas for Library Fundraising” returns 24 million pages, academic and public librarians alike will find more than a few creative and effective ideas, succinctly described and categorized. Go get them, indeed.—Rebekah Irwin, Middlebury College