Practice as a marketing tool: four case studies - Marketing of Library and Information Services

Library Trends, Wntr, 1995 by Iain Duncan Smith

Abstract

Marketing is frequently viewed as a set of strategies and techniques that belong to administrators or to individuals outside of librarianship. In addition, marketing is viewed as a set of highly specialized skills and tools which reside only with experts. Marketing is also a stance which, rather than being separate from practice, is an essential element of good practice. This article examines the experiences of four librarians who adopted a marketing stance as they attempted to improve not only their practice but also their institution's services. The role of marketing in assisting the profession in defining a role for itself in today's information society is also examined.

Practice as a Marketing Tool

Kennedy (1993) opens his book, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, by invoking the ghost of Thomas Robert Malthus. He argues that Malthus's examination of the issues facing late eighteenth-century England are metaphorically linked to the issues facing the global community in the late twentieth century. Malthus was concerned that England's rapidly increasing population would overwhelm England's resources and result in the collapse of English society. Kennedy goes on to explain why Malthus's vision of England - an England faced with "increasing starvation and deprivation, mass deaths through famine and disease, and a rending of the social fabric" - never occurred (p. 5). Kennedy argues that three developments allowed England to escape the future that Malthus had predicted for it. These three developments were a massive emigration of people from the British Isles, significant improvements in British farming output, and a vast leap in productivity due to Britain's successful entry into the Industrial Revolution (pp. 6-7). In essence, England escaped Malthus's vision because a declining population placed fewer demands on existing resources, and significant gains occurred in both the effective utilization of existing resources and the development and exploitation of new technology-oriented resources. While England was able to avoid the future that Malthus predicted for it, not all portions of the world were as successful. Kennedy points out that, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, England and India had similar per capita levels of industrialization. By 1900, however, India's level of industrialization was only one-hundredth that of the United Kingdom (p. 11).

For Kennedy, Malthus provides a nice frame for discussing the challenges facing today's global community. Kennedy sees those challenges as dealing with the world's population explosion and increased illegal migration, the robotics revolution and global labor demand, technology, and shrinking national sovereignty (p. 17). Kennedy's discussion and elaboration of these issues and their interconnectedness is too lengthy and well-developed to be condensed here, but, at the risk of over-simplifying his argument, his basic concerns can be reduced to the following two questions:

1. How does the world best use its existing resources to equitably meet the needs of the most people? 2. How does the world best use developing and newly discovered resources to equitably meet the needs of the most people?

Just as Malthus provides a frame for Kennedy, Kennedy provides a frame for libraries and librarians in today's information age. Like the countries and regions of the world contained in Kennedy's book, libraries and librarians are struggling with a population explosion in the form of users. This population explosion places an increased demand on limited human and material resources. At the same time that libraries are experiencing an increase in the demand for traditional library services, information technology and a changing information infrastructure are forcing libraries to consider developing new services for new clienteles. In essence, libraries are faced with a "Malthusian dilemma" all their own. Like the challenges outlined by Kennedy and Malthus, these challenges are ones which deal with how to equitably allocate resources to ensure that the needs of the most people are met.

The nature of this Malthusian dilemma is discussed by Childers (1994) in his recent study of public library reference service in the state of California. Childers conducted focus groups and individual interviews with a variety of library personnel to develop an accurate picture of the reference service that was being provided by California's public libraries. His findings indicate that reference service in that state has been severely degraded over the past ten to fifteen years. The main reasons for this degradation are a decline in the human and material resources needed to provide reference service coupled with an increase in demand for these services. In addition to these two factors, the introduction of information technology resources into the service program of most of the state's public libraries has made reference transactions so complex that a large number of library patrons are no longer able to help themselves. Childers also found that these challenges had not been equally distributed across the state. Some jurisdictions were better off than others, but it was not unusual for there to be libraries that were "haves" and libraries that were "have nots" even within the same jurisdiction. This imbalance is reminiscent of the imbalance Kennedy found among the various regions of the world in terms of resources and the demands placed on those resources.