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The Librarians View
Marion Wilson, Senior Manager for Planning and Development at the University of Newcastle in Australia first heard about the Scopus ambassador program when she was contacted by her Elsevier Account Development Manager. “When we heard about SAmP we were very keen,” she explained. “It seemed a good way to provide an additional awareness-raising resource to the faculties to encourage their use of Scopus. Given our investment in Scopus we really want to maximize awareness and usage. The SAm Program supports those goals.” Whui-chun Tsui, Librarian at the National Taipei University of Technology in Taiwan agreed, saying, “SAmP is a brand new approach we have not taken before and I feel it’s a proactive and innovative way to reach out to our end users.”
Of course all libraries already undertake regular promotional activities, sometimes employing marketing professionals to help. “Employing students in this way had not come onto our radar before,” said Marion. “A lot of the time we don’t have the funding for such activity, so we all felt SAmP was quite a generous program and a good opportunity.”
In terms of SAmP’s success, most participants feel it’s still early days to comment definitely on the effect the program has on usage but initial response is positive. “Feedback to date is more qualitative than quantitative,” explained Marion. “With ScienceDirect, we know we’ve doubled our usage over the past year and we know Scopus is extremely well received in the faculties. We’ve been getting positive feedback about its linking capabilities and more. So, we’re pretty sure Scopus already has a market within our user community. Building on this audience is where we need to go next.”
To help do this Marion’s team has been utilizing Scopus promotional materials such as post-it notes and quick reference guides. “We use them at the front desk when giving information to students to get the message out and initiate more questions from the student base,” she remarked.
Librarians and publishers alike are aware of the increasing importance of usage data in justifying subscriptions and renewals. Marion noted, “Usage data is the key qualifier for our subscription products. We of course balance this with other concerns such as platform quality and general accessibility, but, at the end of the day, it all comes down to usage. That’s why we’re so keen to promote our resources. We need to see a good return on investment with products like this. They are first-rate products but we want to ensure we are paying best money to get best results for them.” Whui-chun Tsui similarly noted, “When faced with budget cuts usage is the deciding factor. If we are forced to make a choice between two similar products, we will make the evaluation based on the usage of the product and how popular it is with the end-user base.”
Programs such as SAmP are only one facet of the efforts required to raise awareness of library resources. At the National Taipei University of Technology, Whui-chun Tsui’s team has also benefited from product training provided by vendors. Whui-chun additionally cited the library’s annual promotion week as one of their key usage-driving activities.
All agree training is essential and it offers opportunities to further build relationships with a library’s diverse communities. “At the University of Newcastle,” explained Marion, “we employ our faculty librarians in much of our end-user awareness promotion. The big bonus with these librarians is that they all teach the faculty and take training on information literacy, citation referencing and library resources into lesson areas. Consequently, they have a good understanding and in-depth level of engagement with faculty.”
It’s important to engage with communities and reach out to them via new means, such as the SAm Program. “We find as many opportunities as possible to interact with campus student associations,” Marion stated. “Our main focus is to be involved with different student groups. We can’t just expect them to come along to the library to find the resources so we have to seek them out and promote proactively.”
With so many key products to promote to library patrons it’s sometimes with “great difficulty,” according to Marion, “that the library ensures they all get adequate focus and attention. This is something we have been talking about managing more successfully in the future. To date everything has been a little hit and miss. However, when we look at our usage stats across the product range we see a healthy balance with no particular data sets being neglected. That said, it’s a challenge to ensure we get high usage across the board and in future, with funding restrictions, we’ll have to be more careful about what we purchase.”
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