Marketing and Promoting Electronic Resources: Creating the E‐buzz!

Citation

Shelton, M.E. (2010), "Marketing and Promoting Electronic Resources: Creating the E‐buzz!", Collection Building, Vol. 29 No. 2, pp. 79-79. https://doi.org/10.1108/01604951011040189

It is great when the title of a book really reflects what the book is about. That is the case with Marketing and Promoting Electronic Resources. Although this book was published as a Special Issue of The Serials Librarian, it deals with much more than just electronic serials. The editor has done an excellent job of selecting a set of papers that covers a range of topical issues that are cohesive and focused on marketing and promotion. Several papers deal with marketing to different target groups. Other papers look at tools and methodologies that can be employed in marketing electronic resources. There are also papers that showcase how specific electronic resources have been promoted. Throughout, the authors provide very helpful information on their individual marketing experiences, the planning, missteps and outcomes, and results of research that they conducted along the way that was relevant to their situation.

Dubicki begins the book with some helpful background on marketing and the challenges of doing so within the library environment. A number of other papers also provide good background information, some overlapping Dubicki's comments, while others, such as the papers on “word of mouth” marketing and referral marketing campaigns, aptly provide expanded knowledge supported by relevant research. Another paper looks specifically at how RSS feeds can be utilized. More marketing methods are showcased in the other papers as the authors detail their own projects or provide case studies of what several institutions did to address their needs. Most of the papers take a more general approach, talking about many kinds of electronic resources. Others focus on just one, typically a new resource, examples being a new metasearch service and an SFX service. Like other campaigns mentioned in the book, these two services are discussed in detail, and the authors provide accompanying promotional material that helps to see exactly what was done to promote the services. Because the target market is so important to marketing, one paper looks at just marketing to distance students, while another looks at community college users. Several of the papers mention how marketing is done differently to faculty than to students.

This is an excellent book that provides much good background on the marketing challenges other libraries have faced and how they dealt with them. Although it focuses primarily on academic libraries, all libraries will find this information useful.