Linda Hazzan Makes a Public Library Legible in Public

The easiest way to misunderstand Linda Hazzan’s job is to picture a poster for story time. The poster matters. So do the story, the child, the caregiver, the branch and the question of whether the family ever discovers the program. But her real brief begins where that picture ends. As Director of Communications, Programming & Customer Engagement at Toronto Public Library, Hazzan helps a sprawling public institution explain what it is becoming to the people who already own it.

That is a peculiar kind of marketing. Nobody checks out at a cash register. No quarterly earnings call rewards a clever slogan. The “customer” is a resident, and residents arrive with different languages, devices, schedules, abilities and assumptions. Some want a novel. Others need internet access, a quiet desk, a cultural event, help navigating digital life or a place to hear difficult ideas discussed in company. The institution has to be familiar enough to trust and surprising enough to reconsider.

Hazzan has been doing that work at TPL since at least May 2006, when Toronto City Council recorded her succession as Director of Marketing and Communications and named her the library’s representative on the Mayor’s Roundtable on Arts and Culture. Twenty years in one leadership orbit can look like stability. Here it means something closer to continuous translation. The library she first marketed was already moving online. The one she represents now spans physical branches, digital collections, cultural programming, civic conversation and instruction in emerging technology.

The product before the public product

Before the library, Hazzan held marketing, product-management and production-management positions in high tech. Her public biographies describe work developing, delivering and promoting emerging technologies across North America. That background gives her library career a clean through-line. New technology and public services share a communications problem: both require people to update a mental model while the thing itself is still changing.

In high tech, the new model might be a product category. In a library, it might be the idea that a branch is not a warehouse for books. The latter is harder because the old model is beloved, vivid and partly true. Books remain central. Yet the institution also offers tools, expertise, events, digital resources and places to gather. Good communication cannot discard the old picture. It must widen the frame.

A moment from 2008 catches the institution mid-update. At Toronto’s first Web 2.0 Summit, Hazzan and then-City Librarian Jane Pyper spoke about the library’s experiments with online tools and social networks. At the TPL booth, staff helped Toronto Fire Services establish a Facebook page. It is a small anecdote, almost quaint now, but useful. The library was not merely adopting a channel. It was acting as a guide for another civic service trying to understand one.

“When I talk about telling our story, it is certainly about making people aware of who we are, what we do and why we matter; but it is also about making sure that we are held accountable to the people who we serve.”Linda Hazzan, on public relations in a public institution

A different bottom line

Hazzan’s clearest idea is also her most portable. In a for-profit organization, she has said, public relations often supports revenue. In public service, it communicates value to constituents. The distinction sounds tidy until you try to operate it. “Value” is not a single number. It is awareness, access, use, trust and the resident’s sense that a tax-funded institution has improved the texture of daily life.

Her department therefore joins functions that companies often scatter. Traditional marketing communications sits beside strategic communications and stakeholder relations. Public relations works proactively, telling the library’s story and raising awareness, and reactively through media relations, issues management and crisis communications. Cultural and special-events programming belongs in the same portfolio. That pairing is more logical than it first appears. An event is communication people can walk into. A civic forum turns an institutional promise into a room where disagreement can happen face to face.

The accountability half matters because library communications operates under public scrutiny. In 2012 and 2013, TPL tested advertisements on the back of date-due slips while looking for new revenue. The pilot produced a wonderfully Toronto detail: a patron who found a pizza coupon called it a win-win. It also produced principled objections about commercial messages inside a public institution. Hazzan’s response was measured. There were few comparable models, revenue was uncertain, and any program had to balance income with the library’s primary public-service role.

There is no cinematic flourish in that answer. There is a process, a trade-off and an admission that the evidence was thin. Institutional credibility is often preserved in exactly this unglamorous register.

When digital adds a lane

In 2013, Hazzan and Vickery Bowles wrote about another apparent collision: e-books versus print. TPL’s e-book and e-audiobook use had risen 103 percent in 2011 and passed 500,000 downloads. But the boom was not simply cannibalizing traditional reading. Demand across formats continued to grow. The future had arrived, and it wanted both.

That finding is a miniature theory of public-service innovation. New access does not automatically make old access obsolete. It may reveal more demand. The communicator’s task is not to announce a winner but to help different people find the right lane.

The pandemic made that principle urgent. In a Canadian Marketing Association discussion, Hazzan described a system of 100 branches, with three quarters of staff working from them, suddenly forced into digital channels. Many customers were not comfortable there. Internal tools and practices were also insufficient for an entirely remote organization. The library’s response reached beyond better posts and emails. Closed branches became food-bank distribution points. Partnerships helped distribute internet-connectivity kits. Communications stopped being a layer on top of service and became part of how service moved.

“A library creates opportunities and lifts the overall quality of life in any community.”Linda Hazzan, on the TPL Opens Doors campaign

The campaign behind the campaign

When Toronto’s branches reopened citywide, the “TPL opens doors” campaign offered a compact phrase for a large proposition. The doors were literal. They also stood for reading, learning, creating and connecting. It was classic institutional copy, but grounded in a genuine before-and-after: doors had closed, services had changed, and people needed an invitation back.

Hazzan’s external committee work widens the same argument. She has served with the Centre for Equitable Library Access, the National Reading Campaign, the Bloor Street Culture Corridor, a Toronto smart-cities working group and Canadian Marketing Association councils. In 2024-25 she joined the communications committee for Freedom to Read Week, a national campaign whose tactics include partnerships, outreach and a shared plan for public attention. Freedom needs principles. It also needs a calendar, approvals and somebody responsible for distribution.

Her conference and podcast appearances reveal a practical operator more than a personal-brand machine. She has taught strategic marketing plans, discussed how libraries position themselves among other community institutions and spoken about reaching beyond the everyday library user. Her 2025 conversation on The Pivot framed the library through social good, lifelong learning and connection. The recurring subject is not Linda Hazzan. It is the machinery that helps a public institution meet people.

Recent work shows the machinery still changing. Toronto Public Library’s AI Upskilling Initiative offered workshops, learning circles, conferences and hundreds of scholarships for an introductory AI certificate. In January 2026, the initiative received Ontario’s Minister’s Award for Innovation, with Hazzan among the past and present staff recognized in the official group. The project is a neat endpoint for a career that began around emerging technologies: once again, the task is to make a new tool understandable and accessible. This time, the classroom is the city.

A whole city is not a segment

The tension inside Hazzan’s role can never be solved. A universal service must speak specifically enough to be useful without shrinking the public it serves. A campaign has to move quickly while a public institution has to explain itself carefully. Digital channels provide reach while excluding people who cannot or do not use them. A library must preserve the meaning people cherish and keep introducing services they never expected.

Her latest public hiring language points toward systems rather than slogans. In seeking a senior marketing-operations leader, she emphasized alignment, efficiency, translating strategy into execution and building the insights behind a higher-performing operation. It is the language of someone tending an ecosystem. At this scale, a brilliant campaign cannot compensate for disconnected channels, unclear ownership or inaccessible execution.

The useful lesson is modest. Public value does not distribute itself. A program can be free and remain undiscovered. A branch can be open and still feel unavailable. A trusted name can become a stale mental picture. The work between offering a service and helping someone use it is not decoration. It is part of the service.

Hazzan’s career has been built in that interval. The posters are in there. So are the podcasts, the crisis notes, the cultural events, the measurement plans, the stakeholder calls and the invitation on the door. Together they make an argument that has to be renewed with every format and every generation: the library belongs to the public, and the public should be able to see itself inside.