Collaboration between Marketing Students and the Library: An Experiential Learning Project to Promote Reference Services

Abstract

As with most academic libraries, declining reference transactions has been a concern at Illinois Wesleyan University’s Ames Library. After grappling with the problem unsuccessfully, librarians sought input from students on how to address this issue. Collaborating with a professor in the Business Administration Department, a two-class series focusing on real-world marketing issues took on the challenge of how best to promote reference services to students. Student-generated surveys and marketing ideas proved useful for making changes to the library’s reference services and for publicizing the service, resulting in an increase in reference transactions between students and librarians.

Student Workers: Essential Partners in the Twenty-First Century Academic Library

“…It is this third possibility that is explored in articles such as Duke, MacDonald, and Trimble (2009), which describes how Illinois Wesleyan University librarians collaborated with a professor to design a project for marketing students about how best to promote reference services to students. There are a few other similar projects where librarians have collaborated with advertising students to develop a campaign to market netLibrary (McGeachin & Ramirez, 2005) and for a project at California State Library at San Marcos (Meulemans & Fiegen, 2006).…”

Information Literacy and the Evolving MBA Degree

“…Here, the library tasked the students with finding out why reference statistics were dropping, even after a new library building was erected. After considering the results of the tabulated survey, the marketing students were to give the library their recommendations for how to increase interactions between the library reference desk and the rest of the students (Duke, MacDonald, & Trimble, 2009). At a later time, a different class designed a promotional campaign strategy to encourage students to use the reference services.…”

“…At a later time, a different class designed a promotional campaign strategy to encourage students to use the reference services. It included an electronic component (a video or podcast), a print ad, a direct marketing element, and an interpersonal promotional piece (Duke et al, 2009).…”

Embedded Librarians and Reference Traffic: A Quantitative Analysis

“…However, as we compare these two trends, we find there is a unique relationship. A decline in the number of reference transactions taking place in public and academic libraries has been documented throughout the literature for several years (Cheng, Bischof, & Nathanson, 2002;Duke, MacDonald, & Trimble, 2009;Martell, 2008;Tenopir, 2001;Thomsett-Scott & Reese, 2006;Zabel, 2005). After analyzing six years of references statistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago Library of the Health Sciences, De Groote (2005) found a steady decrease in the number of reference transactions from 1997-2000 with a sharp drop from 1999-2000.…”

“…These easily accessible, Web-based resources make it very convenient for students enrolled in online courses to do all their research in the comfort of their own home, dorm, office, etc. And because more students are accessing library resources from off-campus (Cheng et al, 2002) they do not see the reference desk and may not see the "Ask a Librarian" feature on the library's Website, nor know there is a librarian available to assist them (Duke et al, 2009). Corroborating this assertion, the University of North Texas (UNT) has seen a 97% increase in their online course enrollment from 1998-2004.…”