Friday, January 18, 2008

Week of January 14 - 18



The Marketing Plan


After creating a timeline of deliverables with my field supervisor (the timeline will be posted soon), I dedicated the first week of my Capstone project to researching the process of creating a marketing plan and evaluating applicable Web 2.0 technologies. I checked out two books from the library entitled Blueprint for Your Library Marketing Plan: A Guide to Help You Survive and Thrive by Patricia H. Fisher and Marseille M. Pride and The Marketing Plan Handbook by Marian Burk Wood. Today I began reading Blueprint for Your Library and I have found it extremely useful in terms of providing a framework for a marketing plan.

Information that I would like to gather in the next week includes:
  • A copy of the Visual Resources Collection (VRC) strategic plan so that I can align the marketing plan with the goals outlined in the strategic plan.
  • Identify the target users of the services that will be described in the plan, i.e. first year students.
  • Statistics on the student and faculty population in the School of Architecture (SOA).
  • Statistics on the use of Digital Archive Services (DASe), an image database available to University of Texas at Austin affiliates that contains images from the VRC and other collections on campus.
I also set up a meeting for next Friday with Laura Schwartz, the Head Librarian of the Fine Arts Library, to review their marketing plan that was also created by an iSchool student as a Capstone project.



Web 2.0 Technologies

I also investigated and evaluated Web 2.0 technologies this week. In order to consoldiate my research on Web 2.0 technologies, I downloaded a widget from the UT Libraries site, which allows me to post links to del.icio.us directly, and I posted a few links to my user account, which you can access below.



I attended a really interesting session entitled (Re)Thinking the Subject Guide at ALA Midwinter that was sponsored by the Women's Studies Section of ACRL. Different subject specialists discussed their use of Web 2.0 technologies to create subject guides.

I noticed that a lot of librarians are using wikis to create subject guides. I'm not sure if this is a good way to utilize the power of wiki technology, since the great advantage of using a wiki is its capacity for collaboration. For my project I would really like to avoid implementing technology for technology's sake. Some of the technologies that were mentioned in this discussion were both open source and proprietary. The ones that I looked at today included:

One technology that I learned about in class this week which might be interesting for us to implement was microformats. One of the more interesting ones for us to use would be hCalendar, which would allow people to download info about events at the VRC, such as exhibition openings, directly from the VRC website into their calendars.

Conclusion

My research this week has helped me to formulate a structure for the marketing plan and given me greater insight into some of the tools that academic librarians are using to convey library resources to students. Next week I would like to gather the information listed above, continue my research both on writing a marketing plan and investigate tools being used by Visual Resources Collection at peer institutions.