Law, College of

 

Date of this Version

11-24-2015

Citation

American Association of Law Libraries, Spectrum Blog, November 24, 2015

http://www.aallnet.org/Blogs/spectrum-blog/59069.html

Comments

© 2015 American Association of Law Libraries.

Abstract

“Marketing” is a ubiquitous term applied to almost anything. Market your brand. Market your name. Market your product. Market your library. “Market your library” sounds a bit odd – maybe because in academia we don’t think we need to market our library. We’re a firmly established part of the institution. We may change over time, but it’s unlikely we’ll disappear, and any “marketing” we do probably will not result in more funding from our parent institution. But marketing, even in academia, is important because it helps advertise the value we bring to our institutions. We’ve been talking about Marketing a lot over the past few years in presentations (e.g., “Twenty Dollars a Day: Marketing Your Library in Challenging Economic Times”, Marcia Dority Baker and Stefanie Pearlman, MAALL Annual Meeting, 2009) and in articles (e.g., “Tweet Treats”, 14 AALL Spectrum 18, 2009) and would like to revisit the topic and offer new suggestions. Marketing is frequently associated with large outputs of money and long, highly strategized advertising campaigns. Are there ways to market without investing large sums of cash and placing high demands on your library’s time or space? Sure. At the Schmid Law Library we market our library in a number of relatively inexpensive – money, time and space – ways. Our marketing has helped us establish ourselves as an important part of our law school community.

We’d like to share some of our strategies. Borrowing from review services like Yelp and TripAdvisor, we’ll briefly outline what we do, then provide codes indicating how much money ($), library space (⌂), and staff time (·) was involved to help you decide if any of these activities could help you market your library.

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