Marketing men

When people think of marketing they associate it with advertising more than as an essential part of the work of the a librarian. Which is a good excuse for a picture of Don Draper from Mad Men.

Now I've got that out of my system I can talk about libraries! For me the modern librarian has to 'market' the service in the broadest possible sense - if marketing is providing the right services and making people aware that we are providing these services - which is surely part of what librarians should be doing every day.

Web 2.0 can help with marketing simply because it provides so many new outlets for contact with users, or potential users. A significant number of the things we've looked at so far can be used in this way. Facebook and Twitter are brilliant ways to keep in contact with people and tell them about new services, or remind them or services they may have forgotten about - surely marketing by another name.

The opportunities to connect with other librarians that Twitter and professional social networking like LinkedIn are also useful to see what other people are doing: sharing ideas and getting inspiration.

Also the possibilities of things like Delicious, RSS feeds and Zotero to help students are - in the right situation - an excellent opportunity to show how good library services are. Someone who is struggling with referencing, for example could be pointed in the direction of Zotero (or, in an ideal world, given training) by a librarian, and given a positive experience of the support librarians can provide.

Finally the Creative Commons on Flickr seem to me to offer a brilliant way to improve more traditional forms of marketing (posters etc.) as wonderful images can be found and used easily and for free. This is more interesting and professional looking which again hopefully gives a better impression of the library.

Referencing made easy!

Oh my word - I fear I'm a little bit in love with Zotero! I haven't had much experience of referencing software in the past. I had a play with Endnote towards the end of uni, but as I had already made reference notes for my dissertation by the time I'd discovered it, I never did more than having a quick look and think 'what a good idea' and then promptly went off and graduated and left the world of essay writing behind me.

I do, though, remember the sometimes feverishly last minute referencing sessions (it always seemed to take longer than I thought it would) at essay deadline time - something I hope not to repeat at library school. So basically, Zotero to the rescue! I did have to download Firefox specifically so I could run Zotero which is frustrating - as many people have pointed out, plug-ins for other browsers would be handy. The fact that I can see immediate applications for Zotero in my own studies suggests it could be useful for other students and therefore is useful for librarians to be aware of when supporting students.

Browsing and then saving references on the one screen is brilliant - no need to flick from window to window. Obviously it means you have to have Zotero installed on the computer you are using. This is the only really annoying feature of Zotero - you can't log into the website and then manually add a reference to your list. I can see this being frustrating if working from a computer elsewhere - you have to make notes of the reference to add to Zotero later. Delicious could be used for links in the meantime though.

Transferring references to Word works well, although you do have to check the referencing, but simply copying the references still saves so much time in comparison with entering them manually. I also looked at Mendeley in comparison to Zotero and in many ways it works in similar ways although trying to link it to Word created a few problems. It felt a lot less straightforward than Zotero because of this, Zotero was download and go, which is all part of the reason I'm slightly in love!