RUNNING HEAD: Marketing in Libraries: Practical, Creative, and Inexpensive
Samantha Kennedy
Info 893 Practicum
Prof. Lewis
Annotated Bibliography
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1. Chesnut, M. T. (2011). Recession-friendly library market research: Service
learning with benefits. Journal of Library Innovation,2(1), 61-71.
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), 154-158.
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
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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, emails, 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
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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), 5-15.
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), 602-616. doi:10.1080/01930826.2010.488922
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
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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 emails 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 email faculty. This shows that
something as simple as an email 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), 5-17.
doi:10.1108/08880451011049641
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
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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), 79-90.
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
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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), 360-369. doi:10.1080/03615261003623112
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), 107-118. doi:10.1080/01462679.2011.553774
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
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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
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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), 362-371.
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.