I consider myself lucky to have been asked to review this book, since it deals with precisely what I do every day – library marketing. It is interesting to note that in 12 articles only one uses the word marketing, and terms it a four‐letter word! Nevertheless all the articles, in my view, is about marketing. In its contents the book is a catalogue of good examples of library outreach activities, by devoted librarians. It does not give you a theoretical approach to library outreach. Two of the articles defines the word outreach (Johnson, McCord, Walter and Schneider), the first uses the definition by the American Library Association; any program of activities “initiated and designed to meet the information needs of an unserved or inadequately served target group”. They go on to compare outreach to liaison relationships between librarian and academic faculty, through which librarians work with faculty, using subject expertise regarding concepts and skills associated with the location, use, and management of information. Examples in the book range from building web pages; library coffee house with exhibition; book club for students; faculty workshops; integration of information literacy into the curriculum, etc., and target groups as diverse as teenagers with an interest in library research; fire fighters; African‐American churches, farmers, students and faculty etc., also with very different goals – promoting library use of course, as well as library resources, but some argue that today it must be the expertise of librarians that we should promote. One article describes a project which, in my view at least, had as its goal to make the library and librarians look less intimidating, and thereby building a strong brand for the future.
The final article, “Outreach: why, how and who? Academic libraries and their involvement in the community”, written by Tina Schneider, should have been a good starting point for the book, instead of a concluding remark. The author defines outreach as independent efforts to move beyond the library walls or traditional clientele to interact with their surrounding communities. She goes on to discuss the three, in her opinion, factors outreach is based on, and states that most outreach activities deal with children or youth, local business interests, or local health services. This article could have been used by the reader to evaluate the other 11 in the book. Since it has been placed at the end of the book this is not invited.
It also highlights a question that most of the other articles lack – the question of the primary task of the library. When it comes to outreach activities towards students and faculty at the university there is no problem, but how do you motivate time‐consuming activities outside the university? In my library the first question we ask ourselves when discussing an activity is: of what benefit is this to our funding body, the university.
I choose to highlight on three articles, the articles I found most interesting. The first being “If you build it will they come? using a new library building to establish a culture of marketing” by Karen Brodsky. The author is the only one who uses the word marketing and she stresses the importance of marketing libraries because of the competition that has evolved during recent years – the library used to be the place to go when you needed information, but isn't any longer. The article describes the process by which they not only built a new library, but also worked extensively with in‐house culture and marketing the library and its resources. The author stresses a lot of issues I find of vital importance if you want to market your library successfully, i.e. the library director has to have a strong commitment to marketing; the staff must acknowledge the need and responsibility to market; the library staff has to grab marketing opportunities as they come. The article describes a “state‐of‐the‐art” process to work with marketing and to produce a marketing plan in a user‐centered library, highlighting brand identity, the web site as the most important marketing tool, and that it is possible to do a lot even with a limited budget. She also gives examples of activities during the different steps in building the new library. All in all it is a success story of changing the image of the library.
The interesting fact in “Instructional outreach across the curriculum: enhancing the liaison role at a research university” by Corey M. Johnson, Sarah K. McCord and Scott Walter is that the article stresses that today we should leave our old focus on getting more users into the library and promoting use of library resources; “Library outreach has changed from a focus on bringing people into the library with the aim of resource discovery, to one of librarians bringing instructional and subject expertise to collaborative efforts with partners in academic departments and in other offices and programs across campus”. In a world where many librarians are afraid they will not be needed any more, because our users can reach “everything” on the web, search the databases themselves etc, I think this is a very important view. We need to show them librarians add value! The examples of outreach activities in this article are about library education and integration of information literacy, similar to many of the other articles in this book. It is interesting to note that so many stresses the importance of library education, when in my experience libraries are organized in such a way that library education and marketing/outreach/liaison librarians are not in the same department.
An article I found innovative was “Taking library recruitment a step closer: recruiting the next generation of librarians” by Ira Revels, LeRoy J. LaFleur and Ida T. Martinez. The authors describe activities arranged by Cornell University Library to build a base of future academic librarians from a minority group. They implemented the Cornell University Library Junior Fellows Program – an initiative aimed at high school students from minority groups. The six‐week program was developed in response to the need for innovative approaches to the recruitment and retention of persons of color in the academic library profession. The article describes the program's curriculum, performance outcomes, and challenges. In my institution we have programs working with three different high schools in the Stockholm area to recruit future medical students and researchers, from minority groups and from families with no members with a higher education. I have never before heard about similar programs for librarian, but I think the idea is great. Already today we serve students from very different backgrounds, while most librarians (in Sweden at least) are white, middle class and with a degree from the humanities or social sciences, and with masters degrees in library and information science as well. No wonder it is hard to communicate with some of our user groups.
One question discussed in the library marketing literature is missing in this book – the question of what to call our users. Can we call them customers? However, since the book is more of a list of good examples than a theoretical look on library marketing, and only one article even uses the word marketing, it is perhaps not so strange.
I would like to recommend this book to all librarians interested in the field of library marketing/outreach. One thing to take into consideration is that it has a focus on American conditions, which makes some of the examples less applicable in other countries. Also every article has a comprehensive list of references that inspires further reading.
