E-Tech

The LibrarianinBlack and Aaron Schmidt gave an interesting presentation on online outreach at Internet Librarian. Many of the ideas in there seem to have more utility for public libraries (i.e. the suggestion to market your library on local community web sites), but I think there is lots in there for academic libraries to consider.

Marketing digital content online, via Wikipedia, YouTube, etc... is one of the best things an academic library can do. I am still taken with the University of Washington paper, Using Wikipedia to Market Digital Collections. Every academic library should be strategically and systematically linking their content from freely available, highly accessible sources.

A while back, I made some edits/ additions to the Libraries Wikipedia entry (my pal Amy in Altoona also worked on it, and brought it to my and others' attention in the first place.) Compared to other library Wikipedia entries, it's not bad yet isn't as good as others.) In addition to expanding this page, linking digital content to other relevant pages (such as linking this Fred Waring video to the Waring Wikipedia entry) would be a great marketing strategy.

One final Wikipedia marketing idea---take a look at the TAMU Libraries Wikipedia entry. They've made an effort in the primary article about their library to market their electronic resources and digital repository heavily.