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December 09, 2003
Criminy
Jessamyn West is the subject of a Bookslut interview. Near the end is the following exchange:
If you could require one continuing education program for all librarians what would it be?
Customer service. Including the reference interview, how to tell when a patron is done with you, computer troubleshooting, basic web design, marketing your library and just generally learning to be affable.
Whereupon I had two reactions.
The first was fundamentally selfish: 'Oh for goodness sake, not her, too ...' I get nervous when people talk about how librarians need to market libraries for a very basic and personal reason: I was in marketing. While I was in marketing, that's when I decided to become a librarian. Because 1) I hate marketing and 2) I'm no good at it.
To be fair, I was involved in marketing stocks and financial performance, not products or services ... the former is a good deal less glamourous than the latter. I was hideous at cold-calling, but I learned how to toss around the boilerplate to make an earnings release re-emphasize the company's new themes for performance/mission/market/blah. And I whipped up not-bad corporate brochures with nothing more than Word 6, Powerpoint slides and Windows 3.1.
But the parts of the job that I truly loved were helping people with their computers and helping people find information. That was only 5% of my job and it wasn't enough. And the rest, except for the desktop publishing part, bit the wax tadpole (a very euphemistic understatement). So, I thought about library school or tech support and I quit my job and eventually went to library school.
So now, I go to SLA events, and read about what other things about library education, and go to conferences that discuss the future of librarianship and I keep hearing the same thing: we must market our selves, our services, our libraries in order to be successful and useful and patronized. And I believe that's true. I also believe that if -- on top of being a good researcher, having a modicum of tech savvy, having an interest in helping others and a desire to work on becoming articulate -- in order to be a good librarian, I have to develop a skillset in an area where I not only have no interest, but that I have actually failed at ... that's when I start looking at LSAT schedules. While the above may be an ugly sentence, it is one without exaggeration. And I know I'm not the only library student who feels this way, even if there are increasing levels of interest in joint MLIS/MBA programs.
My second reaction was about the use of commercialized language and concepts to advance information commons and non-consumerist models of community resources. But I'm willing to cop to it being a rationalization of the first reaction.
Posted by misseli at December 9, 2003 06:17 PM
Comments
I find that most who talk about libraries and marketing have a very simplistic view of what marketing is and/or confuse it with PR. Those that do understand seem to borrow too heavily from a definition of marketing that is applicable in the commerical world, but not in the community/not-for-profit/arts etc world. Hence, this crazy push towards MBAs which I find ludicrous. What about degrees in public policy? Public administration? Why MBAs?
Do the Ps apply to libraries? I haven't really seen an argument about this, but I tend to believe that they don't in the traditional sense, yet that is what 99% of library marketing articles talk about, without questioning the concept.
Posted by: Fiona at December 10, 2003 04:14 PM
Jessamyn responded very graciously via email to my little rant ... she's in charge of community outreach at her job and I think we're in agreement about the need for librarians to embrace outreach and promoting library offerings and resources to the community. One could accurately describe it as 'marketing' but I find that term both lacking and with lots of connotations that we don't stop to think about.
Your comment about the commercial vs. non-profit strikes a personal nerve. The one thing that truly frustrated me about my library management class was that there was only a very quick and somewhat shallow review of non-profit vs. for-profit organization management. And my professor looked at me like I grew two extra heads when I tried to distinguish stakeholder politics (like the way people may feel about their favourite non-commercial radio station) and motivations from standard employee motivating factors.
Posted by: misseli at December 10, 2003 10:36 PM