The Book Crawl: Engaging Adult Customers Through Pop-Up Programming

Prince George’s County Memorial Library System’s (MD) Book Crawl is a series of pop-up outreach programs created to engage the adult population, local businesses, and community partners in Prince George’s County. Many library programs target youth and families with children, often creating a gap in services for emerging adults, new adults, and families without children. The Book Crawl brought drag bingo to breweries, crafting to coffee shops, trivia to restaurants, and Name That Tune to bars in the hopes of filling that gap and creating new library users while promoting and strengthening relationships with small, local businesses. This session will cover what made this program work, what setbacks we had, what lessons we learned, and how others can replicate and scale this program to meet the needs of their communities and library systems.