Proactive Marketing for the New and Experienced Library Director
Going Beyond the Gate Count

Proactive marketing for the new and experienced library director offers theoretical reasoning and practical advice to directors on how to better market the function of the library within and beyond the home institution.

Melissa U.D. Goldsmith (Author), Anthony J. Fonseca (Author)

9781843347873, Elsevier Science

Paperback / softback, published 26 August 2014

220 pages
23.3 x 15.6 x 1.5 cm, 0.69 kg

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 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.

So you’ve inherited an academic library: Promotion through physical space
The academic library as an educational system
Your virtual presence should not go virtually ignored
The library website: From Facebook to face-to-face
Getting your “friends? into the library
Social media as marketing: Virtual spaces and virtual messages
Engaging students through the arts and the humanities: Meaningful programming
Getting students back into the library
Beats and bongos lead them to books
Librarians in the laboratory
Partnered programming in the sciences and social sciences
Using visually-oriented special collections materials to engage the community
Documents, figurines, high-def movie stills, clothing, and photography
Using special collections materials and creating learning centers to engage the community: Historic instruments, films, tools and toys
Collegiality and collaboration: Marketing the library and its librarians to faculty
Reports and rapport: Marketing the library to all stakeholders

Subject Areas: Sales & marketing [KJS], Library & information sciences [GL]