Thing 19 - The Things in Library marketing

I thoroughly enjoyed this week's reflective Thing and was surprised at how strongly I agreed with the various posts that Andy had put up for us to peruse. Truth is, I had never given much thought to the difference between 'advertising' and 'marketing' our services before, aside from the fact that 'marketing' seemed more active than simply 'publicising' or 'advertising' what we did. Reflecting on the new opportunities at our disposal however, I found myself vigorously nodding at various sentences.

I wholeheartedly suspect that there will be a direct link in the next few years between how well libraries manage to merge the 4 Ps of product, price, place and promotion with the 4 Cs of content, context, connections and conversations, and the value our users will continue to place on our services, how central libraries will remain in our users' lives. In short, this could well make or break library services. It's not 'Out with the old and in with the new' though, but more a case of making room for the new ways of communicating with our readers alongside the more traditional ones.

I would very much like to point my readers back to my favourite SlideShare presentation discovered when dealing with Thing 11 (slideShare):

Social Software in Academic Libraries for NYPL

On a different note, I had not imagined when I embarked on the 23 Things programme, that even more than the Things themselves, and the content and contexts I started to master, it would be the connections between people I would grow to value so much. I have learnt as much from colleagues' blogs as from the official site and discovered a wealth of expertise I didn't even know existed. Add to that the unexpected comradeship and the professional thrill of connecting with colleagues I hadn't yet met, and I'll have to doubly cheat on this week's task: I can't limit myself to just one Thing . Despite all my reservations, blogging - or rather reading other people's blogs for the large part - will be one of the Things I'm hoping to keep up to date with.


Our Library had already decided to implement a Library Facebook page and a Twitter account, so it would be misleading to say that these were a result of the 23 Things adventure. My choice of tool to start will therefore be SlideShare, for the immediate opportunities it offers us right now.

Oh, and by the way - LOVED the Tweeting and Facebooking that's going on in the Orkneys, and pleasantly surprised at the Library of Congress - thanks for sharing these!

Thing 11 - SlideShare

I found SlideShare fairly straightforward to use even as a novice, and the resources there were some of the most useful I'd come across so far, so I'll be grasping the full scope of opportunities that SlideShare gives me, both for professional development and for use in our Faculty Library. It's an easy way of sharing documents in their original formats (Word, PowerPoint, pdf) which would otherwise not sit well on a website (pages of uninterrupted text just copied and pasted anyone?). Such a tool can be used to make available all sorts of information which would otherwise be awkward and non web-friendly to share, such as reports from library surveys, annual reports, guides and help documents... It's versatile, slick and engaging which makes it efficient from both the librarian's and the reader's point of view.

As for the content, why reinvent the wheel when others have produced and shared good material? SlideShare's strength lies in the free access to quality documents shared by respected colleagues.

I particularly liked the following PowerPoint presentation which seemed to fit in perfectly with what we're analysing on the 23 Things programme, making a very strong case for the use of Web 2.0 technologies in libraries and outlining how crucial it is that libraries embrace these technologies if they want to stay connected to their users. I loved the balance between quotes, screenshots and examples, and pure bullet-point facts, and thought they covered the topic extensively:

Social Software in Academic Libraries for NYPL

View more presentations from Ellyssa Kroski.

I also liked the following report on a survey looking at the innovative use of new technologies to attract new readers, as it's an area I'm interested in:

Social Media, Libraries, and Web 2.0: How American Libraries are Using New Tools for Public Relations and to Attract new Users - Second Survey November 2009

View more documents from Curtis Rogers.

I was impressed to find Keren Mills' Arcadia report there too. SlideShare was not a place I'd even thought of looking for Cambridge-related documents (well, obviously, since I'd never heard of SlideShare before, so how could it have been on my radar?), but that's changing as of today!

University of Cambrigde Information use on the move

View more documents from Fred Zimny.

Last but not least, I loved Andy Priestner's presentation on plagiarism, complete with clear examples and survey results highlighting the scope of the problem, as well as advice and guidelines for avoiding plagiarism:

The Plagiarism Code

View more presentations from priestcam.

All in all, SlideShare turned out to be another one of these 23 Things gem: I'd not heard of it before but it's made my top 5 list in just a couple of hours. I'm grateful to have been introduced to it!