Marketing Library and Information Services: Connecting from the Past to the Future

Perception of and Attitude to Marketing of Library and Information Products and Services by Librarians in Public University Libraries in Bayelsa and Rivers States of Nigeria

“…Some view it in terms of its potentials. For instance, Gupta (2003) acknowledges that over the years, events have shown that marketing is necessary for continual existence of libraries, even though librarians hardly recognize it. Onwubiko and Onu (2002) believe that marketing library services in academic libraries can greatly help libraries reach prospective patrons who need library services but are reluctant to solicit library assistance and thus, remain unsatisfied.…”

“…This is as a result of some challenges or forces which tend to frustrate or undermine their operations. Such challenges have been identified to include a growing user population, information explosion, complexity in information needs, increasing prices of information resources, mounting competition from allied information service providers, rising library costs, declining budgets and its competing needs from various library departments, networking challenges, widelyavailable information services and sources, the mismatch between library founding missions and marketplace demands, increasingly-competitive employment and fundraising initiatives, change in user's mode of satisfaction, emerging new technologies and services (Chegwe & Anaehobi, 2015;Gupta, 2003;Jestin & Parameswari, 2005;Madhusudhan, 2008). These challenges or forces tend to gather momentum and seem to persist.…”

“…The impetus to put the idea to practice is probably drawn from the fact that libraries and information centers have started to recognize the importance of marketing of information products and services as an essential part of administration, especially as a means for enhancing user's satisfaction and promoting the use of library services by present and prospective clients (Jestin & Parameswari, 2005). Consequently, there has been a massive growing interest in marketing among nearly all types of libraries across the globe in the past twenty years (Gupta, 2003). Thus, librarians are involved in marketing various information products and services.…”

“…In Nigerian university libraries, some of the information services mostly marketed include online services, photocopying services, lending services, seating and study facilities and reference services (Nwegbu, 2010;Odine, 2011). These information products and services have been marketed by libraries using different approaches including relationship marketing (Besant & Sharp, 2000), internal marketing (Dworkin, 2003), image building (Peggy & Morgan, 2000) and customer loyalty (Gupta, 2003). Marketing of library and information products and services is executed by human beings in libraries.…”

Guerrilla marketing for information services?

“…The marketing of information services is a comparatively new topic (Jose and Bhat, 2007; Gupta et al , 2006; Decker and Hermelbracht, 2006; Muet and Salaun, 2003). Well established in the business environment marketing is at the same time a dynamic and fast changing discipline and there are many innovative techniques being introduced.…”