Library marketing: a strategic approach to an interactive library experience

Olin College of Engineering is a young college (last ten years) set up to bring more hands-on training, entrepreneurial spirit, cross-disciplinary learning and design concepts into engineering education. Students are a diverse group with a range of talents beyond their academic excellence. Dee Magnoni is its Library Directory with some background in advertising.

The interactive library: escaping temporal exhaustion
Olin's library is not huge but Dee believes that you learn by more than just reading and writing; the interactive collections reflect this. The library is a 24/7 space to escape "temporal exhaustion" (when we're too busy to pause and contemplate, our creativity suffers). The small staff at Olin doesn't sit behind a desk. The virtual collection is much larger and deeper than the physical collection. The library is full of games (chess), modelling kits and other interactive "realia" to encourage creativity and thought. It sounds like an inspiring and fun place to learn.

Encouraging e-resource usage
Olin puts most of its budget into e-resources, and makes sure they're used by holding a vendor fair. Olin advocates four steps: goal, timeline, budget, communicate. Dee allows herself 6 months to plan a fair! and works with other departments (IT, facilities) and external partners (caterers, balloons, photographer). In attracting vendors Dee communicated her own excitement along with the benefits for vendors. Vendors have been "fabulous" in partnering with costs and prizes. In the run-up to the event she put together and distributed publicity posters and flyers, and re-confirmed all the vendors and suppliers.

Dee's event coincided with "Talk like a pirate" day and so they used this theme and the seasonal treats (caramel apples and cider) to theme the decor and catering. In order to enter the raffle, users had to answer the question "What did you learn?" - a great way to elicit feedback such as "I learnt where and how to do my research". She also gathered feedback from vendors as to the value of the event to them. "One event is not going to solve all my PR challenges," she notes, and tells us the lessons she learned:

• always communicate more, more, more
• be ready for something to go wrong, because something will
• don't do it alone - get all the support you can from vendors, suppliers, internal depts
• make sure you, as well as everyone else, have fun!

A multichannel approach
Olin does other forms of marketing and Dee cites Springshare's LibGuides as a useful tool for helping students to find resources in specific areas. The library has a Facebook page, uses Wikis, blogs, instant messaging and news feeds to reach its users (I applaud this multi-channel approach). Dee has also carried out considerable research among faculty and students to inform her strategic planning, and has created an external library advisory board (including vendors, researchers, a copyright expert, a consortia director and faculty from other colleges) to visit regularly and provide strategic advice as well as occasional tactical input. Isn't this a great idea - I wonder how many other libraries are capturing the skills of those around them in this way? Dee rates conferences as an opportunity to pick up on the zeitgeist and share experiences with others.

Exemplum, exemplum, an example from your own life ... One library realised its students weren't taking in the guidance they had received from the library as freshers, and were calling their parents for the kind of help the library should provide. So the library scrapped its freshers event and invited the parents to tea, so they would later tell their offspring to use the library.

The library as part of the bigger study picture
At Olin they talk about information fluency, not information literacy. Dee gathered together relevant standards and worked with students to come up with their own curriculum (which they called Lifehacks) with modules on sleep, nutrition, relaxation, and "everything else you need to be successful to study". She paints a compelling picture of a library that has been able to grow itself into being precisely what its students need it to be - I guess the challenge for others is to be able to evolve from a more traditional library into an interactive and welcoming environment such as Olin has managed to create.

Library marketing: running an event to promote usage

"Marketing isn't taught in library school, and I think we're at the point where it should be," says Ruth Wolfish from the IEEE. I have just followed coloured footprints along the hallway to Ruth's session so it was clear before I even arrived that it would be a break from the norm. I think the guys next door in the API session were jealous.

Ruth's starts with her tips for a successful event: make it meaningful, time it right for your audience, promote it well to the right people, get the endorsement of influencers in your target audience, make the benefits clear - and make it fun.

She then proceeds to set us a task list, starting with checking for conflicts and scheduling your project tasks. She suggests involving students in creating promotional materials, and seeking assistance from vendors and support staff around the university. She emphasises the importance of food in attracting attendees, and suggests a quiz or a raffle to keep people there until the end. Ruth's guidance even extends to design tips for your promotional posters - "uniform and easy to read" fonts, making primary messaging more prominent, avoiding too much text, being careful with colour combinations.

A really good event makes library staff more accessible - Ruth cites one library's Halloween event where librarians dress up; students see it as a "don't miss" event and remember the librarians personally afterwards. Ultimately the objective is encouraging more usage of the library and its resources (I was a tiny bit late for this session and I hope that objectives were brought up at the beginning as well as pitching up half way through - all marketing has to start with clear objectives against which success can later be measured).

Communicating your event
Library blogs are taking off - particularly in the US? I think - and Ruth shows us lots of examples, commenting on the layout of the text (make sure your offers are clear). She also shows examples of how universities are using Twitter "to communicate with our users more effectively" - library hours, catalogue updates, "whatever you want to say". It doesn't take the place of existing communication channels (website, newsletters) but adds to the library's means of publicising the e-resources on which it spends such a considerable amount. We look at one library's Facebook page which highlights all their events ("pizza in the library") and incorporates applications added by the library e.g. catalogue search, find articles, news feeds etc. Use the photo galleries to help build your library's presence and character.

Ruth moves on to "Little Ideas with Big Impact" - with examples from librarians all over the US, including "flyers in places people can't avoid (back of toilet doors)" and tear-off slips to remind people of the dates and times of your next library events.

I'm pleased that Ruth closes with measurement. I couldn't agree more with her assertion that you need to "make sure that you measure your success - that you have metrics when you're asked for them." She suggests thinking along the following lines:

• What does the library do for the school?
  
• Has usage gone up since you started running events?
  
• Have you had more research requests?
  
• Did you make new contacts?
  
• Have you been invited to speak at classes?

Ref. Bhatt, J., Wolfson, R. "A successful collaborative partnership among the Faculty and Librarians at Drexel University and IEEE" - a study Ruth co-authored that may provide further insight into the value of library marketing.

July issue of Serials now published

The Editorial Board of Serials thought it would be a good exercise to alert blog readers to the new issue of Serials which has just been published and contains many of the popular presentations from the recent conference (including T Scott Plutchak's and Melinda Kenneway's highly regarded papers). We've also included some of the breakout sessions, including Paul Harwood's briefing on the UK consortia landscape with a guide for librarians, publishers and intermediaries, and Nol Verhagen's briefing on "the licensing battlefield" from a consortium perspective.

Other papers concern the scholarly community in China, e-textbooks, the usage factors project, journal collection evaluation and much more..

Read it here (subscription or members only for current three issues) - http://uksg.metapress.com/openurl.asp?genre=issue&issn=0953-0460&volume=20&issue=2
Subscription information here: http://www.uksg.org/serials/subscribe

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