Introduction Marketing in the academic library: how does it differ from outreach? The library marketing literature relies on definitions of marketing outside of public service industries, commonly citing Kotler, who defined marketing management “as the art and science of applying core marketing concepts to choose target markets and get, keep, and grow customers through creating, delivering, and communicating superior customer value” (1972, p. 4). Mar- keting, in this definition, has three parts: creation, delivery, and communica- tion of value. Translated into a library environment, we create services and resources of value, we deliver services and resources of value, and we com- municate this value to our customers in competition with others (campus buildings for study space, the open web for resources, for example). The work of assessing these services and resources so that we can make the best choices with our limited funding to provide “superior value” to our “cus- tomers” that is the work that we do as collections librarians, public service librarians, information literacy librarians—library workers of all types. This book will largely focus on the latter task of marketing: communicating superior value. In an attempt to define and differentiate library outreach, Stephanie Diaz summarized library outreach as “work attributed to library employees communication between library employees and people not employed by the library a targeted current or potential user subpopulation temporary or periodic work goals focused on changing attitudes, awareness, use, or knowledge of library-related issues” (2019, p. 189). The idea of value that exists in definitions of marketing are suggested in this definition. We hope to make our users (and nonusers) aware of the value the library brings to the institution and even to society. That awareness should lead to changed atti- tudes and increased knowledge and use of library services and resources. These definitions get used interchangeably despite their different scopes, and
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