ADVERTISING (EXHIBITIONS) IN ACADEMIC LIBRARIES

ADVERTISING (EXHIBITIONS) IN ACADEMIC LIBRARIES

Libraries have a primary obligation of delivering prompt and needful information services. For these information services to be able to meet their information needs, they must find a way to interweave their educational, aesthetic, recreational, cultural, economic and technological activities; not taking their age, gender or academic cum social status into consideration. Due to the fact that librarians pursue users’ satisfaction in information provision, different libraries and their librarians have been in constantly looking out for better tools and means to make their target audience aware of the services they have to offer and the resources available to them so that they can achieve their primary aims and obligation and thus maintain their status as the main hub of knowledge. When it comes to this, we can also say that advertisement can not only be applied to the profit-driven industries, but also to the non-profit organizations like libraries so that their clients’ attention can be drawn towards what they have to offer.

There was a report by one researcher that made it clear that librarians began introducing marketing techniques into the library profession as early as 1876. The researcher recorded that librarians became innovative and serious about the business of information service at that time and therefore deployed different strategies in luring library users. They deployed most of the things like direct mail, telephone solicitation, banners and exhibition; all in a bid to get more users into the library system, though all these were not formerly introduced until the 1970s when formal marketing started taking place. Advertising surfaced only in public library articles in 1896  because libraries must develop new promotional strategies to reach out to current and potential  users, exhibition became the instrument of promotional and marketing communications in libraries.

Advertising today in libraries in libraries exist in various forms and sizes and libraries today leverage on this development to tell the world what they have to offer and how to go about getting whatever it is they want from the library.