To Market, to Market

Abstract

Although the truism may be that "the library is the heart of the university," provosts and presidents want to see data that justify continuing, much less enhanced, financial support. Academic librarians now find themselves in the business of marketing their products to their users. As a result, the University Libraries must not only provide essential resources to promote and facilitate the mission of WMU, but must bring faculty, students, staff, and the community through its doors-or, at least, to its Web site. To respond to this challenge, a Marketing Committee was created in December of 2003 and given a fourfold charge • PROMOTE: To promote library services, collections, news and events to the University community and to the public. • COORDINATE: To coordinate the University Libraries marketing activities. • COMMUNICATE: To streamline and foster communication among library administration, faculty, staff, student employees, and the University community. • PLAN: To develop a strategic marketing plan for the University Libraries. To begin our work, the Committee set a priority for marketing by recognizing a primary constituency: the WMU faculty. We quickly concluded that the real key to marketing is to develop a strategic partnership with the faculty whom we serve as liaisons. In a recent survey of students by the Marketing Committee, we found that, according to 87.6% of the students surveyed, their instructors required use of the Libraries. This statistic indicates that the instructor plays a lead role in whether students use the library in the completion of their course requirements. In response to this need "to inform faculty," some library liaisons are already sending electronic newsletters to the departments with whom they work. The newsletters outline new and useful databases, special workshops, and other information that specifies relevant library services. A workshop later this year for other liaisons will facilitate wider development of such newsletters. In addition, the Marketing Committee learned that shotgun notices and general articles did not have a significant impactand were not cost effective. According to Peter Hernon and Ellen Altman, authors of Assessing Service Quality: Satisfying the Expectations of Library Customers, (Ablex/Greenwood, 1996), a marketing problem exists in that many libraries seem to be more interested in attracting non-users than keeping present users