Crowdsourcing in the Library?!

 Crowdsourcing-the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.

Can a library really benefit from crowdsourcing?  What about my library- a middle school library for secondary students, grades 6-8. I do feel my library could benefit from crowdsourcing. My library (like pretty much all of them) has a set of unique problems, and crowdsourcing can help with some of these issues. And, besides the problem-solving trend, open innovation seems to be something our library could use and benefit from in that we could seek the input from others in order to help our school's library to continue to improve. I am sure I could do I better job at this. Currently, I am mainly using Instagram and a controlled Intranet environment to collect feedback and other data. 

https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/library-crowdsourcing-projects-provide-productive-distraction-social-distancing-covid-19

 One thing I have been doing is working with a small group of students that felt our LGBTQ materials were lacking. To an extent, they were right. However, we also discovered that many of the titles are not easily searchable in our system. We started discussing what would help members of the LGBTQ community feel more comfortable searching for materials, such as certain language or vocabulary. From this, we started a small virtual group (with permission from administration), and our group of 7 expanded to well over 30 overnight! Tons of ideas started filtering in- vocabulary and verbiage, materials, etc. We are now up to 52 over the course of a week. Granted, this is a controlled virtual environment, but I am surprised how quickly the contributions came streaming in and can only imagine if this was more open to the community.

It's a start, right?