Libology Blog

Coffee and Libraries go together (at least for some of us who are addicts of both).  That is why the Free Starbucks Coffee Recipe E-Book (direct link to zipped Pdf file) is a nifty download brought to you by CoffeeFair.

thanks to ResourceShelf for the link

To celebrate the 100th birthday of Louis L’Amour, Bantam Books is providing a free copy of “Education of a Wandering Man : The Centennial Hardcover Edition” to any free lending library in the United States.

found via the Unshelved blog

Marketing Your Library is a blog chock full of ideas, lists, and links for marketing, you know, your library!

from LISNews

There is a post on LISNews today about “Suitcase Libraries” in South Africa. These are basically small book collections in suitcases which are distributed to preschools to help encourage reading in areas with low literacy. The original article is here.

Viewing this caused me to think of two things:

1. The traveling libraries used by the Lighthouse Service, and
2. What if public libraries were to purchase several rolling carts, place an interesting range of books within the carts, and arrange to rotate these carts among various retirement and nursing homes? This could be combined with the ability to request materials (which could be delivered with the carts). The rotation could match the library’s checkout period (2 weeks, 3 weeks, etc.), and rotation of the carts could be done by library staff one day each period. During each cycle, one cart’s worth of books would be changed out for fresh material. I suspect that this could be a terrific service for a library to provide, given the interest in organizing it.

Just a thought!

Where can us library types get our temporary tattoo fix?  No need to head out on that highway, just take a gander at Archie McFee!

Could be a good promotional idea for a library….

from Librarian.net

Coming on the heels of my previous post is an article about just the sort of creativity I referred to, although it deals with programming rather than marketing.  Isn’t it better to get attention from activities than simply promoting, though?

from ResourceShelf

ALA’s ACRL (Association of College & Research Libraries) has posted an interesting article called “Developing a long-range and outreach plan for your academic library: The need for a marketing outreach plan“. It describes a series of promotional activities to market an academic library to the campus as a whole.

I am not sure that their approach is, as a whole, what a campus library needs for promotion. Their initial budget is $10,000, which I suspect is waaay beyond most marketing budgets, even for many of the larger libraries.

Some of the expense seems high: $3,000 annually for an e-newsletter, which although it includes the creation of a newsletter designed to reach 5,000 people, shouldn’t require more than someone who can create a listserv and design a good, basic template to contain the articles. Web hosting services usually offer some sort of site statistics in their packages.

I could consult with a library, helping to get it started and training someone on staff to keep it running, and not have it cost more than $600 dollars (and it wouldn’t require more than $70 per year to keep it going, as long as they used the tools and resources developed in the initial consultation.

Also: $4,000 of the cost is for signs and promotional giveaways. These are great: you need well-made signs, and giveaways are neat. Buy a bunch of customized pens, create your own bookmarks, and be creative in finding other things that your students will use that you can “brand”. However, I would skip the stickers, and make the money go a lot further than the few hundred students who would actually get the swag listed in the article.

Academic libraries that could consider spending $10,000 on this type of promotion (few and far between) are likely to be able to tap into campus resources for signs, promotions, and technical support. Those who cannot afford that type of money (most of us) can still do a great deal to promote their services, and oftentimes have a great deal of on-campus support to draw upon.

I recommend creative brainstorming among the library staff, with some funds available to support good ideas. The ideas themselves are free (as in priceless), and should be the core of your promotional activities. Plus, the library staff become part of the promotion, which is a bonus.

All of this, of course, has been my $0.02 (and assorted other change)

original link from ResourceShelf