Proactive Marketing for the New and Experienced Library Director
Going Beyond the Gate Count
- 1st Edition - August 25, 2014
- Imprint: Chandos Publishing
- Authors: Melissa U.D. Goldsmith, Anthony J. Fonseca
- Language: English
- Paperback ISBN:9 7 8 - 1 - 8 4 3 3 4 - 7 8 7 - 3
- eBook ISBN:9 7 8 - 1 - 7 8 0 6 3 - 4 6 8 - 5
Academic libraries have continually looked for technological solutions to low circulation statistics, under-usage by students and faculty, and what is perceived as a crisis in… Read more
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Request a sales quoteAcademic libraries have continually looked for technological solutions to low circulation statistics, under-usage by students and faculty, and what is perceived as a crisis in relevance, seeing themselves in competition with Google and Wikipedia. Academic libraries, however, are as relevant as they have been historically, as their primary functions within their university missions have not changed, but merely evolved. Going beyond the Gate Count argues that the problem is not relevance, but marketing and articulation. This book offers theoretical reasoning and practical advice to directors on how to better market the function of the library within and beyond the home institution. The aim of this text is to help directors, and ultimately, their librarians and staff get students and faculty back into the library, as a result of better articulation of the library’s importance. The first chapter explores the promotion of academic libraries and their function as educational systems. The next two chapters focus on the importance of the role social media and virtual presence in the academic library, and engaging and encouraging students to use the library through a variety of methods, such as visually oriented special collections. Remaining chapters discuss collaboration and collegiality, formalized reporting and marketing.
- Offers clear, concise writing, with thoughtful discussions of the problems facing academic libraries
- Demonstrates comprehensive and thoughtful research that informs theoretical approaches to realistic outcomes that address these problems
- Provides helpful tables, illustrations, and photographs that evidence the collaborative nature of contemporary academic libraries
- Provides practical examples from actual experiences that can be adapted by readers
Library directors and academic administrators, with a secondary audience consisting of academic librarians, MLIS students, and teaching faculty
- List of figures and tables
- Figures
- Tables
- About the authors
- Acknowledgments
- List of acronyms
- Preface
- Proactive marketing and the current situation
- Ineffective, passive marketing: a failure at academic libraries
- Proactive marketing as active marketing for the academic library
- Using this book: an overview
- About this book’s readership
- 1: So you’ve inherited an academic library: promotion through physical space
- Abstract
- New director visions and the academic library as a building
- The learning commons is not the universal answer
- Repurposing furniture and proactive marketing
- Paying attention to the academic library’s large-scale features
- Valuing the library space as physical space
- Beyond fixtures and materials
- You’ve also inherited people
- Breaking down the four-wall isolation
- Conclusions
- 2: The academic library as an educational system
- Abstract
- Academic libraries within parent institutions: getting on the same page
- Keeping up with political and ethical situations
- The academic library as a premier learner-centered environment
- What kind of academic library and educational system am I inheriting?
- Accountability and (or versus?) education
- Conclusions
- 3: Your virtual presence should not go virtually ignored: the library website
- Abstract
- Relationship to marketing
- Potential for marketing
- Marketing principle 1: make sure it works
- Marketing principle 2: display it like they say it
- Marketing principle 3: link-happy sites make users unhappy
- Role of the director
- Marketing to the academic researcher
- Conclusions
- 4: From Facebook to face-to-face: getting your “friends” into the library
- Abstract
- The digital native conundrum
- More than photos of kittens and food: Facebook as communication
- The advantages
- Our avatars, ourselves
- Conclusions
- 5: Virtual spaces and virtual messages: social media as marketing
- Abstract
- Joining the multiplayer set
- The cloud (within the silver lining): ethical concerns
- Chatting and learning: proprietary software and IM as teaching methods
- If no one chats, did the library make a sound?
- Reach out and teach someone: RSS feeds, podcasts, and remote conferencing
- They like to watch: being there for students virtually
- Extra! Extra! Read all about it: RSS feeds
- Promoting the library with fun and games: Second Life
- Conclusions
- 6: Engaging students through the arts and humanities: meaningful programming
- Abstract
- Meaningful, accessible, and assessable programming as proactive marketing
- An existing problem: where have all the students gone?
- Forgetting the academic librarian as information specialist
- Answering to personalized and individualized needs
- Academic library programming and the engaged library director
- That initial spark: planning for programming as proactive marketing in the humanities
- Preliminary planning for academic library programming
- Using a liaison model to establish academic library programming
- Academic and institutional purpose and identity
- Materials, funding, and logistics
- Assessment
- Librarians as teachers
- Programming as the academic library’s learner-centered activity
- Conclusions
- 7: Getting students back into the library: “Beats and Bongos” lead them to books
- Abstract
- The Publicity and Public Relations Committee and marketing the academic library
- Marketing problems before PaPR was established
- Successful efforts prior to PaPR
- Further preliminary research for the Beats and Bongos program
- Early planning
- Publicity for the program
- Beats and Bongos in the subsequent years and the Holy Librarians
- The structure of a typical Beats and Bongos program
- Assessment of programming: marketing your academic library for a song
- Conclusions
- 8: Librarians in the laboratory: partnered programming in the sciences and social sciences
- Abstract
- Reaching out first
- The embedded librarian idea (modified)
- Critical thinking and programming for sciences and social sciences
- Thank you, Mr Wizard, Bill Nye – science guy, Carl Sagan, and Dick Feynman: making science cool through popular scientists
- Cultivating creative rhizomes: offering the STEM fields some creative stimuli and outlets
- Giving business some culture: academic library programming with a global emphasis
- Engaging marketing students to market the academic library
- Conclusions
- 9: Using visually oriented special collections materials to engage the community: documents, figurines, high-definition movie stills, clothing, and photography
- Abstract
- Special collections and identity
- Waking up to having accessible special collections
- The donors’ relation to “beautiful things”
- Stuff, wonderful stuff: the allure of visually oriented special collections materials
- Proactive marketing, policy-making, and the rapport between librarian and researcher
- Ideas for proactively marketing academic libraries through their visually oriented special collections
- Finding aids and making visually oriented special collections materials accessible
- Conclusions
- 10: Using special collections materials and creating learning centers to engage the community: historic instruments, films, tools, and toys
- Abstract
- Some solutions to wasted space and resources in academic libraries
- Access to collections is teaching and can shape the curriculum
- Academic librarians as teachers and bureaucratic red tape
- A world of pure imagination, with a little help from the teacher/librarian
- The librarian’s interdisciplinary perspective and teaching
- Teaching with artifacts and online materials
- Grant administration, proactive marketing, and teaching in librariandirected learning centers: our own experience
- Learning centers and transformative knowledge
- Learning centers and media coverage
- Conclusions
- 11: Collegiality and collaboration: marketing the library – and its librarians – to faculty
- Abstract
- Lost in translation, loss of engagement
- Library faculty status is relevant to successful marketing
- We have an image problem: its roots and consequences
- Collaboration, collegiality, consistency
- The librarian is the library
- Collaborators matter: librarians as collaborative scholars
- Being interdisciplinary means getting out
- The role of the director
- Conclusions
- 12: Reports and rapport: marketing the library to all stakeholders
- Abstract
- Revealing “the man behind the curtain”
- Putting it in writing
- Formalizing it
- Crafting a marketable strategic plan
- Being part of recruitment and retention
- WOMMing up to marketing
- Getting librarians involved: walking the walk and talking the talk
- Making service part of marketing: here comes the library!
- Benefiting: you can’t buy that kind of press
- Aspiring to a higher profile lowers marketing hurdles
- Conclusions
- Conclusion
- Index
- Edition: 1
- Published: August 25, 2014
- Imprint: Chandos Publishing
- No. of pages: 220
- Language: English
- Paperback ISBN: 9781843347873
- eBook ISBN: 9781780634685
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Melissa U.D. Goldsmith
Melissa Goldsmith is currently the Head of Digital Special Collections at Elms College. She has published articles and scholarly reviews on music discography, information literacy, academic library outreach, and musical cultures in Notes, Choice, portal, Naturlaut, Screening the Past, Dead Reckonings, American Music, The Journal of the Society of American Music, and Fontes artis musicae. She has a CLIS, MLIS, and a PhD (in musicology).
Affiliations and expertise
Head of Digital Special Collections, Elms College, MA, USAAF
Anthony J. Fonseca
Anthony J. Fonseca is currently the director at Elms College. He has published four books with Libraries Unlimited’s Genreflecting series and has an upcoming encyclopedia with ABC-CLIO, as well as articles and scholarly reviews in portal, Collaborative Librarianship, Technical Services Quarterly, Codex, Dissections, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Journal of Film Music, and Screening the Past, and chapters in various books on music styles and cultures, successful transitions from high school to college, the novels of Ramsey Campbell, and the stories of Robert Aickman. He has an MLIS and a PhD (in literature). Both are regular contributors to encyclopedias with Greenwood, ABC-CLIO, Oxford University Press, and Salem.
Affiliations and expertise
Elms College, MA, USARead Proactive Marketing for the New and Experienced Library Director on ScienceDirect