library+instruction+technology

I finished Judith A. Siess’s book, The visible librarian : asserting your value with marketing and advocacy over Christmas. I heard about this book during the library advocacy breakout during ALAO back in November.

I would recommend reading/skimming the book. It includes many great ideas for library marketing and advocacy. Judith has arranged the book functionally: customer service, marketing, publicity, public relations, and advocacy. She has written each chapter to cover the basics and then she provides examples from academic, public, and special library perspectives. An outstanding bibliography of additional resources is included.

The biggest take away for me is seeing the need for creating simple informative “documents” that communicate the library’s value to our administration, faculty, and students. Judith’s central theme is that librarians are not very vocal about the value of the services we provide. Many administrators, faculty, and students do not make the connection that libraries are paying a lot of money to deliver electronic resources to them for “free”.

I found the article, A Successful Credit Course in Library Instruction by Beth Macleod, over on Michael Lorenzen’s Information Literacy Land of Confusion.

The section on marketing/recruitment for the course was useful. We rely on faculty members and past students to market our two credit hour course.