Week 15 Prompt. Sariks Has A Lot of Good Ideas.

Week 15 Prompt. Sariks Has A Lot of Good Ideas.

Assignment:

"What do you think are the best ways to market your library's fiction collection? Name and describe three ways you do or would like to market your library or your future library's fiction. These can be tools, programs, services, displays - anything that you see as getting the word out."

I don't work in a library at the moment, but I do work in an academic setting where I have to promote faculty research and writing. What I currently do is I utilize our website, bulletin boards and newsletters to get the word out. However, if I were working in a Public Library marketing fiction that would be horse of a different color. If given the opportunity to do this, I would do the following:

1. Per Sariks I would have a Reader's Advisory Service. Make sure that I had a Reader's Advisory Service for fiction on the Library's website. I would subscribe to Novelist or one of the other services. If our library couldn't afford it, I would be the Reader's Advisor and would maintain a blog on the site for suggestions. Perhaps when people are checking out books, I would suggest that they post responses on the blog, and utilize it also as a book club.
2.  Segregated Genre Collections. Suggested also by Sariks. When a patron is looking for a book, some times they don't want to look in the catalog. It is much more organic to walk through the stacks and look for something that catches one's eye. With the segregated collections it's much easier to find out if a library has much to read by just glancing at the for example size of the Romance collection vs. the size of the Graphic Novel collection. If I like romance, and see only two shelves devoted to it, I'm probably not going to go any further. however, even if I don't like graphic novels, if there is a huge area devoted to it, I may go check it out to see what all the bustle is about.
3. Book Displays. Per Sariks suggestion, too. I personally like these. I like browsing the shelves and the shelf recommendations. However, I'm usually looking for recent books when I'm looking at the displays. I think these need to be kept to new books or occasionally themed, but even the themed should have recent works.

Notes

Saricks, J. (2005) Promoting and marketing readers’ advisory collections and services. In

Readers’ Advisory Service in the Public Library. Chicago: ALA. Pp. 136-160