18th July 2006

At the Northern Territory Library's Journal Club of 18 July 2006 we discussed an article recommended as suggested reading by the ALIA President. The article 'Making "E" Visible' by Lesley Williams was published in the Library Journal on 15 June 2006 http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6341888.html The article focused on drawing patrons past the Googles of the world, to revolutionize how electronic resources are promoted.

The article posed a question: Do beer companies leave it up to individual bars to promote their brands?

Of course not! There are huge promotional campaigns (we were able to list off quite a few beer commercials at the Club today) that create consumer demand for beer brands therefore forcing bars to source and purchase the brands best promoted to meet consumer demand. Yet the vendors of electronic resources have entrusted the marketing of their products to library staff that in most cases don't have marketing skills, use jargon and create or honor difficult systems of providing access.

We went on to discuss that "Librarians" are not "marketers" by way of education. Marketing is a profession in itself and quite distinct from that of information management. Few librarians have devoted years refining their marketing skills and why should they. Electronic resource vendors have reps to promote products and they usually do this within the library walls, by visiting libraries and leaving bookmarks and posters behind. According to an OCLC survey "Perceptions of Libraries and Information resources" (http://www.oclc.org/reports/2005perceptions.htm 39 percent of information seekers learn about electronic resources through promotions or advertising outside of the library. Imagine if vendors took their marketing outside of the library walls and ran tv campaigns and the like and clients started contacting libraries and requesting access to this or that electronic resource they'd seen promoted during the AFL broadcast - imagine!

In the meantime while libraries are left to do the marketing of electronic resources we librarians need to really look at the terms used to describe these products and the websites we design to promote them. John Kupersmith's website "Library Terms That Users Understand" (www.jkup.net/terms.html) provides suggestions of non jargon terms that can be used like "e-collection" and "24 hour library" in place of terms clients don't relate to like "databases". The article also provided tips for librarians tackling electronic resource promotion that are worth checking out. At the end of the day though promotion of these resources will only prosper if the vendors get behind the promotion and take it outside of the library - and if they don't should we continue to patronize them?

I'll leave you with this question, because this is a Blog and comments are encouraged.