Marketing Your Library

Location: Online
$250 (Simmons GSLIS Alumni Price $200)
March 1 - March 31, 2012 - PDPs: 15

Most libraries are good at promotion but bad at marketing. If you don’t know the difference, by the end of this workshop, you will! Instead of drafting top-down marketing plans, which can eat up precious staff time and resources, this workshop will enable students to jump-start a grassroots user-centered marketing effort, drawing on web usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s premise that gathering evidence from even two users is better than none.

In this workshop, participants will:

  • Become aware of the marketing cycle
  • Learn techniques—beyond surveys—for gathering information about library users
  • Apply concepts of product lines and market segmentation to libraries
  • Reconceptualize promotional messages to speak to users’ values and emotions
  • Receive peer and instructor feedback on a marketing campaign

The workshop will draw on marketing lessons learned from outside the library world as well as proven marketing successes in public, special, and academic libraries.

“Good pace, great resources that can be taken away and referenced later, great feedback from workshop leader.” –past student,“Marketing Your Library” workshop

Students are required to obtain the following books, from which the majority of the readings are drawn:

  • Dempsey, Kathy. 2009. The Accidental Library Marketer. Medford, N.J.: Information Today.
  • Mathews, Brian. 2009. Marketing Today's Academic Library: A Bold New Approach to Communicating with Students. Chicago: American Library Association.

Please contact the instructor at metzgerr@lafayette.edu for additional information on the required readings.

Rebecca Metzger: Rebecca Metzger is a Reference and Instruction Librarian at Lafayette College's Skillman Library in Easton, PA. In addition to regular reference and instruction duties, Rebecca heads Skillman Library's outreach efforts. She runs a student advisory board, organizes orientations and open houses for students and parents, produces a newsletter for faculty, and promotes library services to students through online and offline communications. On campus, she is a faculty advisor to Hillel Society, an academic advisor, and the chair of the faculty's Teaching and Learning Committee. Off campus, she is currently the chair of ACRL's Instruction Section's Management and Leadership Committee. She has been published in Library Journal and NMRT Footnotes, was selected to participate in ACRL's Immersion 2008 program, and is currently serving as an ALA Emerging Leader. Rebecca graduated from Simmons GSLIS in January 2006.

Please note: While we try to be as accurate as we can be with our workshop descriptions, please contact GSLIS CE or the workshop instructor to ensure that the class meets your expectations for content, format, rigor, etc.

Questions? Email us at gslisce@simmons.edu or call (617) 521-2803