Transcript - Marketing and promotion of rare books and special collections: Gemma Steele

Date: 12 July 2019

Speaker: Gemma Steele

Event description: This talk is one of three that were presented under the umbrella ‘Marketing and promotion of rare books and special collections’ for Melbourne Rare Book Week 2019. This talk features Gemma Steele discussing research she conducted in 2018 on marketing and promotion of special libraries and collections. Other related talks include Daniel Wee and Nicole Kearney.

Transcript

Gemma: Morning.

I would also like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which we are meeting today, the Boonwurrung and Woiwurrung people of the Kulin nation, and pay my respects to their Elders, past, present, and emerging.

Firstly, just FYI – I first delivered this presentation last year at the Asia-Pacific Library and Information Conference. And so there’s an associated paper that is available via the QR code on this slide – if anyone’s interested in reading that – and my slides are also on that website as well.

Now, while marketing and promotions wasn’t something that was specifically outlined in my role statement when I took this job, it’s something that has emerged as an integral part of my role. Marketing and promotions is not just about increasing users and widening access – although that certainly does help – it must also be a concerted effort to advocate for… to build awareness of… and articulate the value of your library service.

In the case of special libraries, it’s often difficult to devise methods, vehicles and activities to market and promote the library service due to the nature of the service itself – and there may also be significant barriers to marketing and promotion of a special library service.

For example, as is the case with the Museums Victoria Library, the collections are locked away in a store room and are not visible, and additionally the library wasn’t mentioned anywhere on the organisation’s corporate website until last year. Both of these things have led to a lack of awareness, both internally and externally, as well as limiting the channels available for promotion.

As a special librarian working in a library that has significant barriers that prevent the library’s effective marketing and promotion, I know I’ve often looked to literature for marketing and promotional inspiration and ideas, and often the examples given in the literature are few and far between or are not able to be applied to my situation.

So, in writing my paper, my aim was to examine the best-practice planning processes for effectively marketing special libraries and collections… and to create a catalogue of practical, real-life examples of methods, vehicles and activities that can be used to exploit strengths and circumvent any weaknesses, in order to promote and engage people with our special libraries and collections.

My paper examines existing literature relating to marketing and promotion of special libraries and collections, and I conducted a survey of special libraries and collections in Australia to identify any gaps in the literature… more on that shortly!

Just before I move on, I want to explain why I have chosen to combine special libraries and special collections here. While there are certainly differences, I believe that both have several similarities: for example, both deal with highly specialised, unique, and often scarce material; both will often deal with a limited number of subject areas; and both often have low visibility within their parent organisation.

So going forward, to make my life a bit easier, and as it’s a bit less wordy, in this presentation I’m just going to use the term ‘specials’ to refer to both special libraries and special collections. So, as I mentioned earlier, as part of this project I conducted a survey in order to identify any gaps in the existing literature, and to help get a sense of how specials are actually marketing and promoting their services and collections.

The survey contained 29 questions, and was distributed using targeted email and Listserv groups, including the ALIA VicSpecials, SA Specials, and ALIArare groups, it was shared on Twitter, and was also included in the ALIA Weekly bulletin. The survey was open for four weeks during March and April 2018, and received 67 complete responses and 7 partial responses, all from within Australia.

And I just want to say, if any of the people that completed the survey are in this room – thanks very much for your time and generosity.

So, I’m just going to run through some of the more interesting or surprising results from the survey – obviously there is a lot more detail in the paper if you’re interested. One surprising finding from the study is the lack of accessible information available about library holdings. The highest result from that question was 54 per cent of respondents who indicated that their library catalogue was available as an OPAC to internal clients, with slightly less stating that information about their holdings were available on either a publicly-accessible OPAC; via their library’s website; and/or via Libraries Australia. 4 per cent of respondents stated that their holdings are not accessible anywhere...!

When asked ‘Do you feel there is a lack of awareness of the services that your library offers to its clients?’ the clear majority of respondents – 72 per cent – answered ‘yes’. Some of the difficulties noted by respondents are listed on this slide…

When constructing a marketing plan, I would recommended that you should consider your library’s weaknesses and brainstorm possible methods to circumvent these weaknesses as part of a SWOT analysis.

To use an example from the results of the survey: if there is a lack of management or organisational support, perhaps try to consider all of the possible methods by which you might be able to lobby, advocate, and ultimately change the perceptions of these people.

As another example, if clients are remote or there is a lack of visibility, perhaps it might be possible to collaborate with your organisation’s IT or marketing departments to increase online visibility and access.

Respondents overwhelmingly agreed that marketing is an important skill for specials to have, and that marketing library services to internal clients is important, with both these questions scoring over 95 per cent agreement. Several of the responses to these questions strongly spoke to the belief that marketing of special libraries and special collections is important, and it’s clear from these comments, and from the high level of agreement to the importance of having marketing skills and the importance of marketing library services, that most respondents do understand why marketing is important.

However, when asked if their library or collection has a dedicated marketing plan only 17.8 per cent answered that it did, which suggests there may be some doubt around how to achieve positive results. It is worth noting however that this figure is up to 17.8 per cent from only 11 per cent at the time of the 2010 ALIA Special Libraries Survey.

The survey asked respondents about marketing and promoting services and collections both internally and externally. Perhaps not surprisingly, the number of respondents who agreed that marketing to external clients is important was a lesser amount than those who agreed that marketing to internal clients is important. Respondents were also asked why they think marketing and promoting externally is important, and some of the reasons given included:

Establishing the library as a community asset

Having an obligation to the public to share collections and promote access to information

Attracting donations

Establishing networks with library colleagues and other affiliated professionals

To create a sense of ‘value’ in the collection

And to build a network of stakeholder advocates

I think it’s important to highlight these positive responses, as negative responses to this question tended to be that it was ‘not applicable’, ‘not relevant’ or that external marketing provided no advantage, and I don’t think that’s true. Even if your library is primarily a resource for internal clients, there are always benefits to being visible and communicating value – both internally and externally.

In addition, I will just note I was surprised that 5.5 per cent of respondents answered that they do not use any of the 16 listed vehicles for internal promotion, by which I can only assume they do not assume to promote to internal clients at all because, as you can see, ‘other’ was also an option [Laughter.]

Another surprising finding was that a relatively small percentage of respondents are using social platforms to publicise their library and collections. Of those who responded positively to the question, respondents tended to post to social platforms an average of five times per month. Interestingly, only 40 per cent of those who responded positively manage their own social accounts, with the rest relying on their parent organisation to post on their behalf. Respondents indicated that social media has been found to be more effective in external promotion… perhaps this could be due to the monetisation of corporate social platforms such as Workplace by Facebook? Or could it be, that some organisations still view social media use in the workplace as timewasting rather than a valuable exercise in marketing and promotion, an extension of the organisation’s own marketing and promotional efforts, and a networking opportunity. I’m lucky that Museums Victoria encourages its employees to share our work on social media and regularly retweets and shares posts from my own professional Twitter account.

I’ve included case studies from other specials in my paper, but as I’m short on time today I’m just going to run through a few things we do or have done at my library. The Museums Victoria Library has a limited number of channels available to market our service and collection – we have very little physical presence as all of our collections are locked away in limited-access collection stores. Despite years of outreach and engagement efforts within the organisation, frustratingly, somehow we occasionally still have patrons who tell us they had no idea the organisation has a library. As a small team with a limited budget, all of our marketing and promotional efforts require a great deal of persistence, proactivity, and creativity.

Internally, we have had successes connecting with new staff members – we send welcome emails with basic library information and web links, we take part in corporate induction sessions, and we run regular tours and rare book displays for staff. We have several pop-up libraries located around our sites and museums for increased visibility, and we take the initiative to personally deliver new resources to clients whenever we can – this ensures that we are known to those who do use the library, are seen to be responsive with a strong customer service ethic – and additionally, we find that face-to-face contact often triggers a valuable conversation.

We make contact with project teams and at the start of exhibition development and renewal projects to offer our assistance and make teams aware of relevant library resources. And we also produce and circulate reading lists based around exhibitions, sites, and projects, and have conducted training workshops on topics such as accessing our eResources.

In addition to connecting with our internal patrons, as a government-funded organisation, Museums Victoria also has a mandate to engage with the public… something that can be quite difficult with no physical, and only a minimal digital, public presence. We tend to find effective external networking opportunities particularly difficult to come by in our situation; however, we’re lucky that some of our collection is visually appealing or unique, which certainly helps to attract attention.

In terms of external promotion, we now have a presence on our organisation’s website after several years of persuasion that this was a good idea and not something that would cause us to be overrun by enquiries – in fact, preliminary impressions from the past year suggest that the quality of enquiries has increased rather than the quantity, as perhaps people are now able to find some of the information they needed by themselves.

Our holdings are available on Trove and Worldcat. We contribute to our organisation’s social media accounts, in collaboration with the museum’s marketing department. We find that partnering with our organisation’s marketing department is beneficial because it takes away the pressure for us to post every day, and also their accounts have a much larger reach than an individual library account would have, due to the multidisciplinary nature of the museum.

We also partner with the Museum’s marketing department to offer regularly-scheduled behind-the-scenes tours of the library. We contribute and loan items to exhibitions, have curated and assisted with exhibits of rare books, and developed online exhibitions.

The Australian node of the Biodiversity Heritage Library is based at Melbourne Museum, and several of our books and journal runs have been digitised for that website…and items from, and information about our library is also featured in their promotional efforts as a result – and you’ll hear more about that later when Nicole [Kearney] is speaking.

We also take part in public events such as Melbourne Rare Book Week – which is why we’re here today! – and Nocturnal, which is Melbourne Museum’s monthly night-time offering slash party aimed at 18-30 year olds. Our collections have been used for inspiration in producing commercially available products - such as artworks, and notebooks (these are available in the museum shop and they’re really pretty) and publications - as well as inspiring visiting artists and tattoo-ists.

Now I actually love QR codes… I’m going to say that unashamedly right now - I think they’re super handy now that iPhone cameras pick them straight away. Anyway, I’ll give you just a second to snap that address or take down the website address if you want to.

Ok, I’m going to dive in now and take a quick look at this catalogue I’ve created…

So I built a wiki!

As I mentioned, I wanted to put together this catalogue in order to gather together methods, vehicles and activities that can be used to promote special libraries and collections, and my motivation for this was that every time I had looked to literature for examples or inspiration, that they were few and far between.

I thought that this project would be a great opportunity to do a whole bunch of reading on the topic of marketing and promoting libraries, and to pull together all of the examples given in those texts, and from my own experiences, into one practical resource.

I chose a wiki because I was really hoping that this could become a collaborative tool – I can’t say that this is a completely exhaustive list, so it would be great if people wanted to add things, add examples or update it as new thought emerges.

Just a quick note about the platform I’ve used as well, because it actually took me a really long time to find a professional-looking, hosted wiki site, that was free and had no ads! And thank goodness I finally found this site, which is called Miraheze, and Miraheze is a free Media Wiki hosting run by expert volunteers – I can’t recommend it enough if you’re looking to do a similar thing.

While I was doing all of my reading for this project, I did start to notice that the methods, vehicles and activities for promotion fit into a handful of neat little categories, and so that’s how I structured the wiki in the end.

And I’ll just show you some of the pages to give you an idea of the content

[VIDEO OF WIKI]

With each page there is generally a bit of an introduction to the topic, including links to references and then a list of some promotional methods, vehicles and activities which can or have been used when developing a promotional mix as part of your marketing plan.

So for example: one idea I came across was to publicise any interesting reference enquiries you’ve received, possibly on your library’s blog or newsletter. This is a bit of a win-win-win as it preserves the information, gives others an insight into what you’ve been working on, and also promotes your reference enquiries service.

Each page pretty much takes that same format, so to give one more example, under the heading of External Promotion, Networking & Partnerships is ‘sponsorship’. Several different examples of sponsorships came up in my reading, including sponsoring competitions, exhibitions, and fellows.

So the conclusion is…

Librarians need to be strategic about marketing.

There are certainly significant barriers facing librarians in marketing and promoting special libraries and collections, but I would suggest that many of these issues could be overcome with the implementation of an effective marketing and advocacy plan. Consider weaknesses and threats and how to circumvent them, and plan to exploit any strengths and opportunities.

I would recommend that marketing and promotions units be embedded in librarianship qualifications in order to equip librarians with these skills, and also to ingrain the expectation that marketing and promotions are activities that a librarian does do.

From the survey results, it became obvious that some librarians are not willing to buy-in to strategic marketing, and others feel unconfident about what to do or where to start. And it’s hard! It is! It does take persistence and it takes creativity, and unfortunately it’s necessary for each individual library to discover what’s effective, depending on their unique circumstances, as there is currently little empirical evidence that captures the impact of advocacy, marketing, publicity and outreach on special libraries and collections, and no best-practice data.

So that’s all from me – thank you for your time! And I’m happy to a couple of questions now, or otherwise you can just Tweet at me, or come find me after.

Q&A

Speaker 1: Gemma I do have a comment, please take this with the intent with which I have behind it. So, as you know me I am the convener for Melbourne Rare Book Week, we use a professional marketer to help us market what we do and I’ve had several discussions with her, and she’s always asking me to produce people that she can then take as someone to promote our events to the media. The moment I mention librarians, a deathly pall falls across her face, and she says oh really? A librarian? And I say no, no I can give you dozens of librarians I know across Melbourne who collaborate with us who are tremendous in this way, but you clearly an issue there, with her prejudice and perception of what sort of person a librarian is, in marketing terms.

Gemma: Yes, I completely agree. I think librarians, libraries, rare books, all of that, have a massive marketing problem. Unfortunately, I can’t be the one to turn that around, but I think things are changing and hopefully in time people’s perceptions will change.

Speaker 1: I think we all have to work very hard at that because you are absolutely right, we all share that problem.

Gemma: Agreed.

Speaker 2: When you were talking about the marketing activities that people were conducting both internally and externally, I was curious as to how much they were limited by their marketing budgets. Obviously they would be, and I’m kind of wondering if there was a question asked maybe about what they would actually like to be doing, or their ideal scenario? So that you can get a feel, because obviously…

Gemma: Yes, and there is more information about that in the paper. So, I would direct you to the paper.

Speaker 2: And the other question was, about what percentage of your time would you spend on marketing activities, do you think? Because it looks like a lot.

Gemma: I’ve never quantified that, but it’s kind of the sort of thing that weaves through everything, it’s not really something that you sit down and say, okay we are going to do half an hour of marketing now. You would maybe have an event that you set up, and the marketing, it’s really just constant to be honest. And I think that’s how it needs to be. With advocacy as well, it’s something we need to move away from the mindset, I think, of this is a marketing activity, that you know, we are going to produce in a newsletter, whatever it is. It’s about communicating value as much as it is promotions I think.

Speaker 3: I’m just interested in the merchandising and your notebook. I work in a kind of resistance to that sort of thing but I’m just wondering, to me it seems like a wonderful opportunity. What is the budget around that, and is that an internal thing that you produce here, or do you go out to a commercial supplier?

Gemma: So these notebooks were produced by milligram, and actually the museum shop here organised all of that, so we had very little to do with it to be honest. But they are using illustrations from the books in our collection, and I can show you these after if you like. There is information about the library on here and things like that. So that kind of happened without much of our input to be honest, which was great because we didn’t really have to do anything. But yes there are other instances where we have produced things, and it’s happened in a bit more of a strategic way. I’m happy to chat about that after if you want to.

Okay, well I’m going to wrap up now and hand over to our next speaker, Daniel Wee. [Clapping.]