What Do Librarians Think about Marketing? A Survey of Public Librarians’ Attitudes toward the Marketing of Library Services

Abstract

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Testing the Premise that Marketing Attitudes and Brand Orientation Correlate with Nonprofit Performance: Connecting Research and Practice

“…Ewing and Napoli (2005) were able, through factor analysis, to discriminate scale items that effectively measure NBO. A scale developed by Shontz et al (2004) to determine librarians' attitudes toward marketing of their institutions was adapted to determine employees' perspectives on the NPO (rather than a library). The Gainer and Padanyi (2005) scale measures effectiveness based on perception of client satisfaction -and compares it to the organization's past and its peers over the past year.…”

“…While assessing employee attitudes toward marketing of their organization is important (Shontz et al 2004), measuring their perspectives concerning the subject NPO proved challenging. First, because the NPO was small, the number of employee respondents (n = 11) made statistical analysis difficult.…”

“…Combining the employees with parent and donor respondents to ascertain a broader stakeholders' perspective on marketing seemed to cloud the reliability of the scale. As this is an exploratory study we used a shortened version of the Shontz et al (2004) scale (7 items) all measuring pro-marketing attitudes. The reported reliability (alpha = .679) is low and though reaching the threshold for exploratory research (Churchill 1979) serves as a limitation for the study.…”

Older Adults and the Public Library: The Impact of the Boomer Generation

“…Piper, Palmer, and Xie (2009) communicate how most older adults are unaware that certain services can be provided to address their information needs. Active promotion of services might bring in nonusers as well as current users of the library community (Allen and Wilkinson 1990;Shontz, Parker, and Parker 2004). Piper, Palmer, and Xie (2009) further emphasize this diversity of need, stating that over 20 percent of the older adults in 2010 came from varied backgrounds.…”

Library Quarterly Management Literature, 1931–2004

“…Even with this conflation, the number of relevant articles has plummeted to fourteen. The breakdown of these contributions is four related to academic libraries, seven to public libraries, two to consortial/multitype libraries, and one to school libraries [137][138][139][140][141][142][143][144][145][146][147][148][149][150]. Topics covered during this period include book storage, the digital library control zone, geospatial information needs, public libraries and embezzlement, and librarians' attitudes toward the marketing of library services.…”