Thoughts.

Academic Library Marketing and Outreach....

My college is the largest CC in the state. It's 45 years old and major supporter of our local community. It's remarkably diverse, hosting many languages and cultures within our walls. On a given day I may hear or see five different languages. It’s wonderful. This school year I’ve seen students from Ghana, Zimbabwe, France, Iran, Burma, Uzbekistan, Romania, Honduras, Pakistan. New Mexico is home to 19 Pueblos and two Apache reservations. In addition, the northwest corner of the state houses more than one-third of the Navajo Nation. ….Approximately 20% of our student body is Indigenous. Another 20 is Hispanic. (ballpark estimate)
We have 5 campuses and a distance learning program. The Libraries are scheduled for three new buildings before 2014. It's a progressive environment -full of life; change happens quickly here.

We work to bring people of all ilks into libraries, advocate their literacy and connect them with knowledge. We hope to create an environment that promotes teamwork, professional development, open communication and creative thinking. Our mission is to develop services and collections that enable students to realize their dreams.

As I look around at the needs of my community and the patterns of my students, I see that our library services are rather invisible to a too-large portion of our 20,000+ students. Although we work hard to recruit patrons we are missing an important lesson.
I'm thankful to take this opportunity to study on how we MARKET our LIBRARY to the COLLEGE and TRADE SCHOOL arena --and to NATIVES, IMMIGRANTS, INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS, and YOUTH who will come to our college working toward opportunity. I am doing my homework; figuring out what I can do. I will build support and apply what I've learned within my own library, and then share my successes (or failures) with everybody else through 2.0 web technologies.


Brain stream on this topic so far...my questions....facets of this endeavor:

• What is the scope of FACULTY-LIBRARY RELATIONS? Cooperation among library staff and instructional faculty: Faculty support is key and they can be our loudest advocates.
• What types of OUTREACH, CURRICULUM coordination, NETWORKING, and ADVERTISING are available to college libraries?
• How do the STUDENTS value our SERVICES?
• Solicit support from college administrative divisions. If the library's mission and values align with the institution's overarching strategic directions, would that illicit more promotion, inclusion, or funding from administration...
• How can Libraries participate in campus CQI (continuous quality improvement) and student recruitment efforts?
• What about distance students? Obviously working with instructional faculty to build bibliographic instructions will bring the students physically in, providing a captive audience for us to teach. We need to connect to the increasing distance student body and meet their information needs equally well.
• What technology can best help us reach the DE population? Video? Librarians can work with Media Resources Division to create instructional videos to post on the website.
• What more can we do to reach the students?
• How can we better support the college and increase our own visibility/accessibility. Too few members of our community are actively using the library which exists to serve their needs.
• People’s cultural awareness, perception, customs language and lifestyle all affect how they attend school and how they study. To reach this population we should consider how cultural sensitivity in library services enhances the student’s educational experience or learning environment

I want the students to think of us first when they have homework, meetings, or downtime.
I want the college to ask us many questions -of all kinds. To use us as a primary resource for information.
I want the faculty to use our resources, give us feedback and collection suggestions.

I like what Joseph Janes said in the Internet Librarian “So let’s rewrite the ending. Those of you who work for educational institutions of all stripes should grab these results and march yourselves into the presence of the dean or provost or principal or whoever is calling the shots and tell her that you’ve got the answers to these problems. Talk about information literacy, about curricular integration, about the value of libraries and librarians in a 21st-century world, about what you can do. Do your homework; figure out what you can do, do it, and then share what you did with everybody else” (http://www.ala.org/ala/alonline/inetlibrarian/2007columns/internetjan07.cfm )