Samantha Kennedy. Info 893 Practicum. Prof. Lewis. Annotated Bibliography

Transcription

1 RUNNING HEAD: Marketing in Libraries: Practical, Creative, and Inexpensive Samantha Kennedy Info 893 Practicum Prof. Lewis Annotated Bibliography

2 Marketing in Libraries: Practical, Creative, and Inexpensive 2 1. Chesnut, M. T. (2011). Recession-friendly library market research: Service learning with benefits. Journal of Library Innovation,2(1), This article highlights using available resources and being creative when marketing an academic library. The librarians at Northern Kentucky University set out to create a marketing plan, and decided to contact a marketing class on campus that required a field study component and an upper level class that had advanced students paired with departments on campus to learn how to do market research. The professor from the upper level class set it up so the library was a client for the students that acted as a firm, which gave marketing and branding ideas for the library. Through focus groups the marketing class was able to come up with ideas on how to improve the library. The next semester, the library participated in the program again that allowed for the possibility of building on the previous marketing class ideas including sending out surveys to gather even more information. The university is going to continue to work with the marketing classes to gain free marketing advice in the future. Any of these ideas can be used by libraries looking for good marketing ideas, especially those in the university of college setting with marketing classes that can be consulted. 2. Crowe, K. M. (2010). Student affairs connection: Promoting the library through co-curricular activities. Collaborative Librarianship, 2(3), This article takes something familiar with librarians, being a liaison, and adds a new dimension to it. Libraries can learn about collaborating with other departments, not just faculty and what kind of overall impact that can have on the library. The author shows how the informal connections librarians had with

3 Marketing in Libraries: Practical, Creative, and Inexpensive 3 student groups and organizations can be taken to another level to increase the impact of the library. Small ideas like showing up at student activities fairs and going to student council meetings can reach students that don t always come to the library. The librarians took this idea to the next level by asking for feedback and making changes to the library according to the information they received. They planned special events to draw students in and even made the library look less like a prison and more accessible to more students. It gives ideas on events to plan that will attract students to the library, like game nights or pizza that were advertised by flyers, s, and Facebook. These ideas can work well in any academic setting and are mutually beneficial to the parties involved. 3. Dempsey, K. (2009). The accidental library marketer. Medford, N.J: Information Today. This book is a great source for anyone new to marketing in libraries. It gives suggestions, tools, and tips to creating and implementing a library marketing plan that will work for your library. The book gives a basic outline for creating a marketing plan, including how to formulate a plan to fit the needs of your library. The book gives advice from marketing professionals and gives potential library marketing pitfalls to avoid. The author gives valuable tools to measure and assess, both before and after implementing new marketing plans. Some other useful items the book includes are items to use when working with the media and giving interviews to newspapers, even giving an interview in a time of crisis. The books also gives good examples of promotional materials and examples of what makes a good flyer or website, giving the reader a better understanding of what

4 Marketing in Libraries: Practical, Creative, and Inexpensive 4 attracts readers. There is also an index in the book to direct the reader to particular items of interest. This book is a great resource for any level of library and ideas can be easily adapted to fit your particular library s needs. 4. Dubicki, E. (2007). Basic marketing and promotion concepts. The Serials Librarian, 53(3), This article gives a good basic brief breakdown of the concepts of marketing and how marketing has changed, especially in this technology based world. The articles touches on the importance of having everyone in the library involved in the marketing of both the library and its resources. It gives the benefits of working in teams and points to resources provided free by the ALA to make the task less daunting for those not familiar or comfortable with the concept of marketing. The author talks about the importance of understanding the library users so you can market resources and services to them better. The article gives examples of how to get information out to users and effective ways to advertise to them. Simple items like posters, workshops, and open houses won t take much out of the budget, but can draw crowds into the library. The article also talks about the importance of assessing the marketing campaign at every step of the way to make sure it s working and reaching the right people. 5. Foster, M., Wilson, H., Allensworth, N. & Sands, D. T. (2010). Marketing research guides: An online experiment with LibGuides. Journal of Library Administration, 50(5), doi: / This article looks at the marketing potential of Libguides, a content management system. The librarians setup a control group and a group that were marketed

5 Marketing in Libraries: Practical, Creative, and Inexpensive 5 through different means to see what the difference was between the guides that were marketed and those that weren t. The library set up a twitter account, blogged, and sent s to faculty to promote those guides and try to expand the marketing of the library. Within a three month period, the marketed guides saw an increase of 63 percent, while the control group saw an increase of 27 percent. Online promotion of these guides drew more student and faculty members in and was able to show off the librarians hard work. The most successful attempt at marketing these research guides was done by faculty. This shows that something as simple as an can increase traffic to a guide. It also helps if librarians are able to teach, promoting their guides and other resources the library has. Even in person reference questions can be a marketing opportunity, allowing librarians to point the patrons to a guide that can help them even after the reference interaction is over. This article shows how using both old and new methods of promotion are important in marketing to users. 6. Germano, M. (2010). Narrative-based library marketing: Selling your library's value during tough economic times. The Bottom Line, 23(1), doi: / This article looks at marketing and marketing issue and what a library needs to do in a recession to successfully and cheaply market itself. It starts off with a concepts familiar to libraries, that any type of marketing is normally an afterthought not only in libraries but also library education. The author wants libraries to take advantage of current upturn of patrons coming into libraries to keep new patrons and show them what they libraries have to offer. Libraries have

6 Marketing in Libraries: Practical, Creative, and Inexpensive 6 switched to a service-oriented model and need to think about how that affects the marketing of the library as a whole. Service marketing allows for more expansive, less specific types of marketing that concentrates on the benefits of the service to the person receiving the service. This can lead to bigger marketing plans that cover a wide range of patrons that will come to the library. The library needs a narrative and story to sell to the customer, and this article gives good examples and allows the reader to better understand how to promote services effectively. The article gives a positive side to the recession by showing how libraries can take this opportunity to create and keep new customers and patrons. 7. Jacobson, T. B. (2011). Facebook as a library tool: Perceived vs. actual use. College & Research Libraries, 72(1), This article is helpful because it goes beyond the how to use Facebook article standards and looks at the actual use of students. There have been many articles written about other aspects of libraries using Facebook, but very few evaluate the how Facebook is actually used by libraries. The author started by gathering information on Facebook pages that were frequently updated (at least once a week) and had been updated within a month of gathering the information, leaving the author with 12 pages to analyze. She looked at the number of fans, the number of posts, photos, updates, events, etc. to analyze which applications and forms of communication were most popular. Then the author looks at what librarians thought Facebook was being used for versus what it was actually being used for. These actual uses can be extrapolated into the best ways to use the social networking tool. The article does caution that the page must be updated

7 Marketing in Libraries: Practical, Creative, and Inexpensive 7 frequently to really make a marketing impact and that it may go out of fashion, though that has not been the case recently. Though a small sample and study, this article shows the what items really make an impact on a Facebook page and what practices are common on Facebook with other colleges and universities. 8. James-Gilboe, L. (2010). Raising the library profile to fight budget challenges. The Serials Librarian, 59(3), doi: / This article looks at how tight budget effect how libraries view marketing in relation to both faculty and staff. The survey provide in the article shows how librarians feel their collections are being used, with 86 percent of librarians believing that faculty and staff do not understand the breadth of resources in the library. Librarians need to understand that they are competing with convenience when trying to get their resources out to students and faculty and they need to think of ways to combat that. One way to do this is to reach out to students and faculty and try to find tools that can compete with Google. It s very important to get the information out to faculty so they can pass the importance of the library resources down to their students. The librarians need to reach out to faculty in meetings and show them the tools that they have and how they can relate to specific subject needs and student needs. 9. Jones, D., McCandless, M., Kiblinger, K., Giles, K. & McCabe, J. (2011). Simple marketing techniques and space planning to increase circulation. Collection Management, 36(2), doi: / This article gives insight into planning library space to increase the use of resources and services. The authors look at space and technology as commodities

8 Marketing in Libraries: Practical, Creative, and Inexpensive 8 that need to be used to the best of the library s ability. Creating displays and better signs can be easily, effectively, and cheaply done to draw people in and help them understand what the library can offer. Moving collections to make them more accessible to patrons was one of the important factors in the dramatic increase in circulation numbers. The library also took advantage of holidays to create displays to draw patrons in. Changing these displays often gives frequent library visitors something new to look at and can increase the circulation of those books. The article shows how a library can take the basic tenants of marketing, product, place, price, and promotion and keep the library as a space relevant. 10. Landis, C. (2010). A social networking primer for librarians. New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers. This book is a guide to understanding what aspects of social networking are accessible and effective for librarians and libraries. It gives a good outline of the social networking tools that can be useful for libraries and some of the lesserknown tools that could drawn in other types of users into the library. Some of the information is already out of date (like setting up your Facebook privacy settings) but information is generally good and can be expanded to the newer versions/settings on Facebook. It has a section on marketing your library through technology and rebranding your library to fit with the new generation of users coming in. There is a helpful section on best practices that goes over etiquette and how to get proactive information out to students. The book goes over the importance of expanding into the student s world without overwhelming it. It includes a section on assessing your library s use of social networking tools and a

9 Marketing in Libraries: Practical, Creative, and Inexpensive 9 glossary to introduce any foreign technology/social networking concepts to those new to these ideas. 11. Sobel, K. (2009). Promoting library reference services to first-year undergraduate students: What works? Reference & User Services Quarterly, 48(4), This article evaluates freshmen s reference interaction and the mediums that the students want to interact with reference librarians. The author understands the importance of reaching students as freshmen to impact their time and the institution. Students in this survey did not show a complete aversion to going up to reference librarians in person to ask questions, which is something many people assume. Also, from the sample over 64 percent has noticed some form of advertising from the library, which shows that by putting the information out there, it will reach a majority of the student population. It was also surprising to see that the freshmen students surveyed felt that librarians could help them with answering the questions they had. This information shows the need to reach out to the students at their starting point in the academic career to show that what librarians can offer them. These students didn t show a preference in virtual or in-person reference, but there are things that need to be further evaluated and marketed so the data can be better understood and the students can understand what services are available to them. This article just starts to show the importance of reaching students in mass when they enter a college or university and should be expanded upon, but it still gives good information.