This article examines Southside Reads, a community-wide reading challenge led by Longwood University’s Greenwood Library in rural Virginia. It brings together the university and surrounding community through shared books and conversation. Built on strategic planning, community partnerships, and adaptable marketing, Southside Reads navigates both virtual and in-person formats, tackles student engagement challenges, and explores multiple channels to broaden participation. Emphasizing the importance of participant ownership and embracing flexibility, Southside Reads fosters connections around a community of readers demonstrating the power of collaboration in academic library programming.
This article discusses how two similar colleges have used author events to market and promote the library by building community across campus. Both Colorado College and Medicine Hat College have successful annual author events. The intent of each event is to feature the success of contributors while promoting library services and resources and building community. The steps involved in hosting these events are discussed to provide the reader with the opportunity to compare the events. The events have been positively received and are supported by faculty, staff, and administration.
This article discusses the organizational logistics of marketing a large-scale Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grant project, including the details of the marketing plan development and its implementation, which resulted in dividing the team into smaller subgroups, as well as the advantages and challenges of working with such a large team. Finally, lessons learned and recommendations are shared for others interested in marketing library projects undertaken on limited and/or fixed budgets.
This article presents the findings of a national survey which asked library professionals about their challenges in marketing e-resources to library patrons and strategies they use to overcome these challenges. The study was conducted by two librarians at NC LIVE in North Carolina to better understand the barriers that libraries of different types and sizes face when marketing e-resources. Survey respondents include 299 academic and public library staff from across the U.S., and the results include both quantitative and qualitative data. Respondents cited diverse challenges in getting patrons to use e-resources, including patron access to the internet and devices, patron aversion to technology, lack of staff resources for marketing, and lack of marketing expertise. The discussion section touches on ways that staff training, pre-made marketing materials, and other tools may help address these barriers at both the library and consortial levels. These results are intended to lead to practical recommendations for increasing patron engagement with e-resources.
This article presents a qualitative case study of the marketing and outreach strategies employed by the Public Services Division of a University Law Library in the Caribbean. Drawing from Armstrong and Kotler’s value-creation framework, the study explores how faculty engagement, student engagement initiatives, branding efforts, and digital marketing practices are implemented within a specialized legal education environment. The findings illustrate how a tailored marketing approach, supported by collaborative partnerships, targeted programming, and continuous assessment, is associated with enhanced visibility and sustained user participation. Descriptive indicators, including high participation in first-year orientation sessions (approximately 90% of an incoming cohort of 160 students), regular faculty consultations across a faculty of approximately 14 full-time members, and an average of five workshops per semester, provide contextual insight into engagement levels. The paper concludes by outlining practice-oriented strategies that integrate relationship building, data-informed outreach, and adaptive digital practices to sustain relevance in a regional legal education context.
In this collaboration between university librarians and faculty, advertising students were given the unique opportunity to treat the university library as a client in a rebranding initiative. This partnership allowed students to work in agency-style teams, simulating a real-world professional setting where they were responsible for developing a comprehensive branding strategy aligned with the library’s newly implemented strategic plan. Acting as consultants, they conducted research, analyzed the library’s current branding, and identified areas for improvement, all while considering the library’s goals, values, and desired image within the university community. This experiential learning project provided students with an immersive experience that went beyond traditional classroom learning. By engaging directly with a real client (the university library), they gained hands-on experience with the dynamics of the advertising industry, including client communication, project management, creative strategy, and ad development. Furthermore, the project generated numerous actionable recommendations for the library’s branding and outreach efforts, demonstrating the practical value of the collaboration.
University archives often hold materials related to little-known aspects of university history. At the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder), the libraries made use of an archival collection to develop One Seed, a seed giveaway program that told the story of how red sunflowers were originally cultivated there over 100 years ago. One Seed has been a popular program among students, university employees, and alumni, drawing attention to a unique part of university history, as well as the remarkable materials within the library archives. This article details the development and first three years of One Seed, showing how CU Boulder libraries used the program as an outreach tool while also forming partnerships across campus. Additionally, the article offers recommendations for replicating the program including considerations for state seed laws and institutional holdings.
In response to the return to in-person activities following the COVID-19 pandemic, institutions of higher education are exploring innovative methods to re-engage students. This article focuses on the reimagining of an academic library’s New Student Orientation (NSO) event with elements from the world of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) to enhance student engagement, foster partnerships, and expand outreach efforts. By creating an immersive orientation experience inspired by D&D, this program aimed to promote belonging among incoming students. This article presents insights into the planning, implementation, and outcomes of this case study. By incorporating student-centered activities and opportunities for active learning into their programs, librarians involved in NSO programs can effectively promote library resources while enhancing library visibility among incoming students.
Marketing is a necessary function of academic libraries but is frequently deprioritized in library job descriptions and organizational structures. This article serves as a case study of how one library worked to formalize marketing efforts by moving from ad hoc committee-based work to structured positions guided by an organizational marketing plan. Sharing examples over time to show the impact of marketing efforts, the authors detail the process of creating an outline for a marketing plan, as well as new initiatives that developed through the process.
This article reviews five free online email design platforms that libraries can use to create visually appealing and engaging email newsletters and other email communications. The five platforms reviewed in this article – Beefree, Mosaico, Smore, Stripo, and Tabular – are assessed according to ease of use, the availability of pre-designed templates, and other features, such as the ability to add collaborators. This review begins with a summary of the library and marketing literature on email communications, including best practices, and ends with a brief overview of email marketing platforms and services.
In 2021, the Houston Cole Library (HCL) at Jacksonville State University (Jacksonville, AL) added a mascot to enhance social media posts, and the result has been successful. HCL’s simple low-cost mascot has consistently stimulated positive interactions between the library staff/faculty and students, community members and university officials. HCL’s library mascot has created a cult-like following that watches and comments on his adventures. This current discussion indicates how any library can create their own mascot regardless of budget restrictions and time commitments.
This article introduces the FIRST Values Framework, a conceptual marketing thinking tool designed to foster empathy in library marketing by aligning strategies with core values and community needs. The framework enhances user-centered design and engagement efforts through five values: fellow-feeling, identification, responsiveness, self-awareness, and thoughtfulness. The literature discusses the significance of empathy in libraries, empathetic marketing, relationship marketing, and incorporating empathy into staff training for service design, highlighting the essential need for empathic connections in library services. The article discusses the integration of empathy across different contexts by briefly comparing the FIRST Values Framework with existing models like design thinking and human-centered design. Practical steps for implementing the framework in libraries are provided, ensuring marketing and outreach efforts are empathetic, user-centered, and impactful.
This article describes the challenges, goals and opportunities of impact-oriented communication for academic libraries using the example of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics. The article describes how the ZBW is working to strengthen its perception as a competent partner and promoter of Open Science (hereafter OS) among its main target group of economists in order to communicate its transformed mission. This article describes the path from the challenges and goals to the concrete communication activities and the evaluation of the impact-oriented communication work.
This article analyzes the process and analytics of the promotion of an asynchronous scholarly communications educational challenge in the setting of an academic health sciences library. The campaign used a content marketing strategy to create interest in and illustrate the importance of each day of the challenge. The campaign resulted in a click-through rate of approximately 8.7%, 63 sign-ups, and 546 research guide views. The reflections on this campaign unveil potential pitfalls and opportunities when marketing to researchers and others interested in scholarly communications.
The COVID-19 pandemic led a library marketing and communication team to question how they were doing everything. Brainstorming sessions and serendipitous technology discoveries led to a media-literacy focused livestream show produced by the team in concert with library faculty and staff from other departments. The result was two successful seasons of a show that brought scholars into conversation with librarians to demonstrate the ways in which expertise can and does lead to answers to questions, and how finding information is only the start of finding those answers—finding credible sources is critical. The show attempts to provide the tools necessary to make those distinctions.
This study explores how academic libraries use humor to communicate their value and services to their university community through social media. This study is a content analysis of posts created by a sampling of seven academic library Instagram and TikTok accounts. The study reviews and categorizes the multiple types of humor present among the particular content analyzed by looking at the combinations of humor types and then separating them out for individual analysis. This analysis shows that while Comparison and Silliness humor types were the most prevalent in the social media posts reviewed, Exaggeration received the highest average numbers of likes and comments. Sarcasm received the second most average likes, while Comparison received the second highest average number of comments per post. These findings suggest that expanding the usage of Exaggeration, Sarcasm, and Comparison in library social media content strategy could encourage engagement from audiences.
