Library Marketing- What Academic Libraries Can Learn from Winners of the John Cotton Dana Awards and Librarians Focused on Public Relations

By Kathleen McEvoy (Vice President of Communications, EBSCO Information Services) <KMcEvoy@EBSCO.COM>

Library Marketing covers a variety of approaches — how does a library’s staff communicate with users to help them know about new resources, collections or tools; changes in hours or new programming; staff changes and research support as well as larger issues of advocacy, library support, and community engagement. How do institutions, be they academic, school or public libraries, position themselves, their staff and services to raise awareness and increase usage? How do they provide for the needs of their users and encourage them to return, online or in-person? How do they take advantage of staff knowledge, research tools and the collections that librarians have built to serve the needs of their communities? In thinking about an entire online issue dedicated to library marketing, our thoughts at EBSCO Information Services turned to the work we do with the John Cotton Dana Awards (JCD) and our own NoveList division’s efforts to help libraries tell their stories.

The John Cotton Dana Awards

For the John Cotton Dana Awards, we work with the American Library Association’s Core Division, the judges (who are past JCD winners), and the H.W. Wilson Foundation, which funds the $10,000 grants given to libraries each year. The awards are the most prestigious awards given out at ALA and focus on public relations efforts. In some form or another, these awards have been handed out since 1940 and we at EBSCO Information Services are proud to carry on the tradition of working with ALA and The H.W. Wilson Foundation to support these awards. The JCD awards are open to libraries of all types, and while this issue features public libraries, the most recent academic winners have similar campaigns designed to raise awareness and funding, promote new resources, communicate changes, and bring more users to the library.

In 2015, three academic libraries were John Cotton Data Award winners. The Loyola University Chicago Libraries’ entry, Celebrate Gorey, was an outreach campaign related to an exhibition of the works of writer and artist Edward Gorey which raised funds for endowments and increased membership in the libraries’ Friend’s Group while also increasing awareness of the Libraries’ Special Collections. The University Libraries worked together to bring the first major exhibition of Gorey’s work to his native Chicago — including more than 1,300 rare items. The University Libraries worked with multiple partners on the campaign including the Loyola University Museum of Art and the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust. The University of Maryland Libraries also won for Thinking Big — a campaign to increase awareness of UBorrow, which is an interlibrary loan service that was being introduced to students, faculty and staff because the university had joined the Big Ten. The libraries were looking to promote the academic benefits associated with membership in the athletic conference. The third JCD academic library winner in 2015 was the Hesburgh Library at the University of Notre Dame. The library used the 50th anniversary of its own building, where the famous mural Word of Life, affectionately known as “touchdown Jesus,” is painted. The Word of Life campaign was created to build awareness of the library and its services.

In 2016, Northwestern Libraries won a JCD Award for their UnDead Tech campaign. UnDead Tech was a social media campaign, the goal of which was to crowdsource donations of old cables and power cords. These resources were needed to access the data stored on digital devices that were long outdated including laptops and cell phones. This unique digital preservation-related campaign used a zombie theme not only to solicit the donations but to increase awareness of access issues related to outdated hardware. The next year, the University of Tennessee Libraries won a JCD Award for a marketing campaign addressing the challenge of connecting subject-matter experts with students and faculty. The campaign was called Information Is Our Game and it leveraged a sports theme to highlight staff expertise. The library staff created trading cards, videos and social media posts of librarians that showcased each staff member’s particular information professional skills.

The latest academic winner is from this year. Rochester Institute of Technology Library’s (RIT) Wallace on Ice campaign came from the need to close the campus’ one library, the Wallace Library, for two years as it underwent a largescale reconstruction project. The plan was to relocate the library to the Ritter Ice Arena which had been the home of RIT’s hockey team. Making this decision during the COVID pandemic created challenges which started with simply making students and faculty aware of the move. Many had missed the initial announcement altogether, so the RIT library created a campaign to eliminate confusion about the move and to take advantage of the unconventionality of the library’s temporary home. Engaging with students and faculty began with a naming contest where Wallace on Ice was born. The library was able to build awareness of the benefits of the new space by creatively using hocky-related themes including pre-season and behind-the-scenes materials. RIT and the seven other 2022 John Cotton Dana Award winners will be celebrated, along with the 16 winners from the past two years, at ALA in Washington, DC.

Library Marketing — How NoveList Librarians Created a Tool to Help Library Staff Market Their Services

EBSCO Information Services’ NoveList division, a company initially created by librarians, has worked with library staff for more than 25 years. As engagement became a core need, NoveList developed LibraryAware creating email, social media, website and print resources — essentially a toolkit for library marketing — that provides resources for library promotion and advocacy to help library staff engage with users and to help tell the story of libraries. Danielle Borasky, MLIS, Vice President of NoveList, says libraries need to promote themselves all the time. “All libraries share a common goal — to engage and support the needs of their community — regardless of whether they serve a community of students or a community of citizens. And they should not be afraid to market and promote their good work. It’s important to let people know about the impact the library is making.” Borasky says libraries need to be where the users are. “People need to find libraries in their inboxes, see them on social media, read about them in the newspapers, and hear about great library services from their friends.”

LibraryAware makes it easy for library staff to communicate changes and promote collections, programs and events with ready-made templates and an every-expanding range of items. To give you a sense for how LibraryAware is used, Brooke Savoie, Public Relations Librarian, Lafouche Parish Library, provided some feedback saying its prepared content and templates is a time saver. “I’ll pull up LibraryAware and there will be new items and I don’t have to put a lot of my time into it. For example, I saw all those new 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten templates and updated our whole program with the new graphics you had. It didn’t take me any time at all because you had it all there. It was effortless. We wouldn’t have updated our look if it was up to me, I don’t have time. I love that you had the reading logs, a certificate, you even had the sign for the child to hold in the photo and items to share on social media.”

Saving time and providing resources that allow libraries to engage with users is just a start. Regardless of whether a library has specific tools, a trained staff, an interested Friends’ Group or a creative team, by undertaking library marketing campaigns, they are able to communicate with users and create the stories that showcase what is happening in their libraries, highlight the impact libraries have on their communities and help libraries reach out and engage with users. By marketing their services, library staff can also give users and supporters a way to advocate for the library — passing on the success stories of patrons, highlighting library resources, collections and activities and reaching out to its audience to showcase the value of libraries.

LibraryAware is primarily a tool for public libraries and the majority of John Cotton Dana Award winners through the years have been public libraries but, as you will read from previous JCD winners in this issue, the goals are the same, the skills are transferable and all library staff share the need to communicate with users, patrons, students, faculty and researchers of all types.