"We believed from the get go that it couldn't be something as you know - pictures of kids in libraries reading books and isn't this lovely," Johnson noted. "We knew from the research that we had to get people to think about the library differently."

They hired advertising firm Leo Burnett to do that. Charley Wickman, part of the creative team who worked on the campaign, says first they had to blast through all the stereotypes.

"Oh a library it's that quiet place and the newspapers are on those long wooden poles and there's rows and rows of books. And whatever, they kind of have this thing in their mind," said Wickman.

To jar those thoughts, Wickman says they paired dramatic photographs of library users with a quirky new catchphrase Geek the Library. The noun, Geek has been used for years as American slang, to describe bookish, socially awkward people. But Wickman says today, the word has taken on a more positive spin and describes what people are passionate about.

"You might put geek and library together - as yeah, the library's a place where like, geeky people go. But when we broke that mental synapse and said no, no, no, the library is a place for cool people to go and get their geek on and that's the thing that made it jump off billboards and jump on posters - that's the way it got people to think about the library different and it got the really quick reaction," Wickman explained.

"It's always exciting when someone takes a word like geek and turns it into a verb," said Lisa Miser, a librarian in Proctor, Vermont who has several Geek the Library posters on display. They show charismatic faces on inky black backgrounds. The words 'I Geek Mythology' appear under one face. Another face has the words, 'I geek barbecue.' Still another photograph shows the face of a grinning young boy - who geeks worms.