The document discusses the importance of promoting online resources to library users. It notes that without active promotion, usage of subscription resources will be lower. It also suggests that libraries should alert users to useful free resources to create engaging sites and establish connections with users. The document then examines some challenges to promoting resources, such as information overload and competition from other online sources. It provides suggestions on how to effectively promote resources, including using metrics to monitor impact, ensuring accurate resource descriptions, and employing search engine optimization strategies.

1. Why promote online resources?
• Responsibilities: to provide users with clear access to subscription resources
– without active promotion usage will be lower
• Monitoring - measure usage and demonstrate value
– to justify expenditure in an age of austerity
• Additionally, alert users to useful non-subscription resources
– create attractive, sticky sites; Stay fresh, dynamic and modern
• Giving users what they want/need: Success = Relationships not transactions
– Establish connections via alerts, recommendations, create awareness etc.
• Part of core mission – education - Information/Digital literacy
– a key related issue to aid the promotion of resources

2. 2012 environment to promote online resources
• Two issues from recent SAGE study (http://libraryvalue.wordpress.com/report/)
"how libraries can better market their services, and
how they can improve perceptions with key decision makers."
• Information overload - "biggest impediment to promoting library services
[summarised by one librarian] was lack of time: for library staff to have time to
promote resources to individuals; for academic staff to read and digest emails".
• Proliferation – competition between e-resources, even when well-presented
– What to promote - New resources favoured? Traditional ones overlooked?
• An era of decreasing e-resource usage, general trend with some specific reasons
– e.g. 2011 Google changed search algorithm; referrals drop subsequently
(JISCmail lis-eresource discussion April 2012)
– Unmediated internet usage (Google etc)- library role for self-sufficient users?

3. Issues to consider promoting online resources
• Metrics – measures to monitor impact, benchmarks, set it all up beforehand
• Metadata – check summaries, what’s new/changed? How well do you know them?
– ensure accurate, and enticing, resource descriptions and links, online and offline
• Technical considerations – is everything functioning properly? can it be fixed?
– Do you have the resource to develop your resource provision?
• Greater visibility - Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – increase your ranking
– Google referrals account for high % of website visits
• Branding - is your name clearly associated with resources? Can it be added?
– “To many people - students, particularly - everything is free at the point of use. Much of my
research has indicated that students do not know the source and certainly do not differentiate
between something that is genuinely free and something that appears free simply because they
have previously logged on to the university system and can seamlessly use licensed e-resources.”
(Chris Armstrong - JISC-REPOSITORIES – August 2012)

4. How to promote online resources – Focus!

5. New roles – to promote online resources
• This is an area that I would argue we have failed to address effectively. I generalise, but I
think librarians tend not to be effective
marketeers. In the past, there has been no
need. We have been the gatekeepers to knowledge, and our users have had no
choice but to engage with us. Now they do have a choice; the impact of technology is that
information has gone from being scarce to ubiquitous in a few years. We can add enormous
value to this new environment, but our communities can choose not to use us. We must
engage more effectively than we have in the past.
• Having said that, I think librarians are effective strategists, and we are good at
developing plans, services and business cases to position libraries in new ways. But we must
think from the user's point of view, understand their needs, create services which
are meaningful to them, and be effective in promoting them.
(The Guardian Online Panel Discussion, January 2012)
• Simon Bains, Deputy Librarian, University of Manchester, since 2011. Prior to that,
Head of Digital Library at University of Edinburgh, and NLS Digital Library manager.

6. An Exemplar - what can be done
• Edinburgh City Library Information Service –'Bookseller' Library of the Year
2012 award winners for "Cutting-edge website…engaging social media activity"
– having 'embraced rather than shirked digital'...extending its ‘all-singing, all-dancing’
online portal 'Your Library‘ and increased usage from 0.4-1.1m (09/10) to (10/11)*
• Developing an app, a UK public library first, with clever add-ons such as a live
bus tracker to help users plan their trips to local libraries.
• Closely linked to their 2012-15 Next Generation library strategy
*(with thanks to Liz McGettigan - Libraries & Information Services Manager - for details)
• So, after some of the theory and practice, it’s boldly over to you...
• …Review your current activity, Revise the approach, Get the right blend…
• Many ways to keep up - a library culture of collaboration and idea-sharing
- blogs, articles, books e.g. Ned Potter’s “Library Marketing Toolkit” (York University)