It's Academic

I recently listened to the ACRL-CHOICE Webinar, “Positioning your Library Marketing for Success,” sponsored by Springer. The archived webcast recording is available at: http://acrlchoice.learningtimesevents.org/archive-sep152015/

While I found the webinar to be very enlightening and informative, I could not help thinking nearly the entire time, gimme a gimmick. Gimmick as defined as a marketing term meaning a special, unique, or quirky feature to make something ‘stand out’ from the ordinary. The presenters offered case studies of successful marketing activities at a few institutions. My interpretation of the title was one of delight and hope that a candid discussion about the strategies of positioning your library for successful marketing might include, at minimum, a summary of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ discussions and growing pains to accomplish these activities. However, instead we were presented with great marketing gimmick ideas patterned after popular ideals to draw attention to the library.

The first gimmick was an example from the University of Maryland Libraries and their use of a robot cartoon character to promote their inter-library loan service, UBorrow, that had just went to a fully automated system. While I was very impressed with their branding of this new service and thought that the robot image would stand out to students, I could not help but wonder if the students not living in ‘library land’ understood the underlying meaning of a self-automated service and the image of a robot. Further, I pondered the idea of the future of librarianship and wondered if this robot with glasses was not forecasting the method of retrieving materials. After all, hotels have already experimented with robots offering room service to guests.

Creative t-shirts, popular songs, and swag are not new ideas to assist the library with standing out and featuring their services however, larger open house events in connection with these items may be a novel idea. At Texas A&M Libraries, they hold a very large open house event one week before the beginning of classes. The open house began as a grassroots effort and now is a two and a half hour performance boasting 4,300 students. The underlying goals of the open house are to serve as an ice-breaker for students to come into the library.

The USTA Libraries blue crew aimed to attract attention via uniforms and branding as the next gimmick highlighted to successfully increase the number of reference transactions. Similar to the big box computer store, the USTA blue crew wore t-shirts, cardigans, button down shirts, polos, and more. The blue crew also rolled out a series of posters with cartoon images, holiday focused events, button branding contest, online connected branding and more. Before the yearlong campaign began, everyone underwent a refresher customer service workshop.

The final and ultimate gimmick was utilized to highlight Texas A&M Libraries Special Collections science fiction focus. The team was able to attract George RR Martin to come to the library and quickly turned the event into a University-wide and beyond event that took a year to plan and cost $32,000. The event became so large that it attracted the attention of the HBO cable channel and ended up being attend by more than 3,000 people. The team also came up with an exclusive dinner event and charged $400 per person and making back the money they spent on the event as a whole. Finally, Mr. Martin donated a first edition book to special collections.

Ultimately, at the end of the day, I feel that it is very difficult to measure the success of marketing gimmicks because they are primarily based on the number of participants and positive responses. If gimmicks are duplicated at other institutions and do not produce similar results can the flaw be identified as the lack of knowing your target audience? How do students decide to engage? With gimmicks or gab (word of mouth)? Do students follow the crowd, social media, or happenstance? Should we include students in the creation of gimmicks for the library? Do we use gimmicks at the end of the day to attract student participation or attention from our peers and administrators? Or is it both? When you are in the business of selling information and ideals, do we need a gimmick or just the facts? So, what’s your current gimmick? Share below :)

One of the ongoing features of our school’s library is a display of materials that speaks to a certain theme, which we change every month or so. Right now, the theme is Labor Day, with books about labor, unions, and related employment topics. This reminded me of an ongoing debate in higher education, one that is discussed somewhat differently by students and by educators, but it generally has the same main theme: What is the purpose of education, especially higher education?

For many students, and I would suspect an overwhelming number of students at our school, the purpose of their pursuit of higher education is to get a job. Sure, most of them don’t mind learning some other things along the way, but most of them seem largely concerned with how the courses they take (and the assignments they are required to complete in them) will help them get a job once they graduate from school.

On a related side note, I want to mention that our school has gone through a number of fundamental changes over the years of its history–it started as a Business School, with the explicit charge of training its students for their chosen vocations. As the employment landscape changed, fields of study were added and removed (for example, we used to have a Travel and Tourism program), but in recent years we have made the transition from Business School to College. We now award Bachelor’s degrees as well as Associate degrees, and more recently we added a Master’s program. Our latest curricular additions have been in Health Sciences areas. However, we have added both specific career-path programs (preparing students to be OTAs or PTAs) and career enhancement programs (Bachelor of Health Sciences programs which have primary goals of helping already-trained professionals to advance to supervisory and management positions.)  We continue to offer degree programs which correlate strongly with specific careers paths (such as criminal justice, legal studies, and medical assisting) in addition to business and communications programs.

So…here at the start of the 2015-16 school year, as we deal with the lingering effects of the Great Recession and what seem to be ever-increasing higher education costs–what do we say to those who question the value of higher education? Those asking the loudest are especially interested in why students are almost always required to take classes in multiple disciplines instead of only taking classes devoted to their chosen major and/or field of study. Why do medical assisting students at my school need to take English and social sciences classes? Why does a music education major at my alma mater (a liberal arts college) need to take a science class?  In our positions as librarians, I believe we are well-situated to help students with a good answer to this. Since we are not the direct instructors of their English/science/history classes, students often complain to us about not understanding why they need this class (when they’re asking for our help with research or in-text citations). First, we can help them to realize that part of the reason they might not excel at these ‘other’ types of classes is because the subject is not only foreign but the ways of thinking about these ‘other’ subjects is different than how they think regarding their chosen field. Taking these classes outside their comfort zone can help them develop different types of thinking–and different types of skills. And for almost any job a student might look for in the future, their prospective employer is going to need them to not only be able to perform their technical job functions–they’ll also need them to perform well at soft skills such as communication, teamwork, and problem solving.

Well-rounded curricula produce well-rounded students–who become well-rounded, productive employees. (That’s the master plan, anyway, in my opinion at least.)  When my next student asks, why do I need to take a history class, I’m an IT major? I’ll respond: classes such as history will help you think in different ways–and being able to think in different ways will help you get and keep a better job.