Marketing to new and established users is an essential activity for all medical libraries. With large and diverse campuses and communities, it is critically important to clearly communicate the value of the library as it relates to services, collections, staff, and space.
A communications taskforce was formed to make recommendations and provide guidelines for communications and marketing related to Welch Medical Library services, collections, new initiatives, physical space, and staff activities. The taskforce included library staff from multiple departments, was overseen by the library director, and received support from the School of Medicine. The taskforce was also charged with creating a marketing campaign to publicize recent renovations to the library building. The audience for the campaign included graduate students, postdocs, fellows, residents, staff, and faculty from the Johns Hopkins Hospital, the Kennedy Krieger Institute, and the Johns Hopkins Schools of Public Health, Nursing, and Medicine.
The taskforce began by identifying the campaign theme, “(re)discover the library,” which was later applied more comprehensively to include the discovery or rediscovery of the library’s collections and services. Ultimately, the campaign focused on four major areas – services, informationists, collections, and space. These areas were highlighted using a website, signs, information tables, announcements in campus-wide publications, posts on external and internal websites, and emails to school-wide lists.
The reDISCOVER Welch Library website (http://welch.jhmi.edu/welch/rediscover-welch/) received a total of 1,431 views between its launch on October 18, 2014, and December 31, 2014. During this period, building door counts trended upward toward prerenovation levels. The campaign culminated in an open house to showcase the library's renovated spaces for collaboration and study. During the open house, the director of the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives delivered a lecture highlighting the historic features of the building and the history of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. The successful open house drew around 80 people from across campus.
The reDISCOVER campaign has had other measures of success. Chief among these has been an improved main library website (http://welch.jhmi.edu/welchone/). As the primary public face of the library, this website was used extensively when developing content for the four areas highlighted by the campaign. This close look at our main website showed where important information was missing and where text was hard to read. This led the taskforce to develop new, easy-to-read web pages describing the library's physical space and two key service units. This marked the first time that the Welch Services Center and the Advanced Technology and Information Services Department had dedicated pages on the main library site. On the web and in other contexts, the campaign has helped focus the library's presentation of its services and resources.
The reDISCOVER campaign successfully highlighted the numerous resources and services that the library offers and brought many patrons into the renovated library building. The use of a multidepartmental team to develop and launch the campaign should be considered in the future as a good model for involving key staff in other important projects. The taskforce effectively reached out to a large and diverse campus community, communicating resources and services that can help users with their research, clinical, and educational activities. And because the campaign website has a permanent home on the main library website, it acts as a continuous orienting tool for novice and experienced users in a frequently changing patron base.
