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Marketing e-resources: What are you doing at your library?
We have not yet done much to market our e-resources (which is why I am taking this workshop). However, we have a Showcase scheduled for this Friday to introduce new e-resources to faculty. I will let you know how that goes.
I can appreciate the importance of marketing these resources. When I first started my position, I was assigned to be the liaison to Nursing. I checked the traffic statistics for the CINAHL database and found surprisingly low usage. As their new liaison, I visited the Nursing department and gave the faculty an overview of what resources the library offers their program. After that visit, they started scheduling library instruction sessions for the Nursing students. After two semesters, I re-checked the CINAHL traffic stats and found that usage had quadrupled! This revelation suggested to me that the faculty and students were not aware of this (costly!) resource and the initially low number of traffic stats were probably faculty engaged in their own research or enrolled in doctoral programs. The whole experience reinforced for me the importance of marketing. So now we are making a more concentrated effort to ensure that our e-resources are better promoted. (What? We actually thought that students and faculty regularly visit the library website to see what's new? That was naive -- and clearly NOT what happens.)
I know that EBSCO and other vendors offer superb online support materials for promoting their products and I am just now starting to make use of these free resources.
Our ultimate goal is to market our e-resources to faculty and I was initially disappointed that this workshop is focused on training front-line staff. However, I can now see the relevance and value of that. We do have paraprofessionals on the desk occasionally and they have not been trained in the use of our e-resources, so I am sure there is a real need for this.
I would like to hear how others promote their e-resources.
Posted:
Oct 17 2011, 12:42 PM EDT by
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