Why does the law school still need a library? Isn’t everything the students need for research available online? With questions like these surfacing more and more frequently, it’s about time that academic law librarians got on the marketing bandwagon! At last year’s Annual Meeting in Seattle, the first meeting of the Academic Law Libraries SIS Marketing Toolkit Task Force was convened by Task Force Chair and AALL Past President Barbara Bintliff, and the members were given their marching orders. Their assignments were to draft boilerplate materials that would support academic law library marketing programs librarians could initiate at their own institutions, depending upon the particular requirements of those libraries and institutions. The goal, according to Bintliff, was to develop a toolkit of “materials that could be used by law librarians around the country to deliver basic, coordinated content to law school administrators and the public, while making it easy to engage in a marketing program customized to their individual libraries’ needs.”
A year later the “ALL-SIS Marketing Toolkit” envisioned by Bintliff is up and running on the ALL-SIS Web site. It is packed with information on academic law library mission statements, annual reports, user surveys, and statistics. Additional articles address the questions:
There are also suggested responses to Frequently Asked Questions such as:
Each article in the toolkit is accompanied by an extensive bibliography of library literature, and there is also a bibliography of materials about library marketing in the 21st century.
Whether you work in an academic or non-academic law library or are just interested in law library marketing, you should take a look at the new toolkit, which is available on the ALL-SIS Web site at www.aallnet.org/sis/allsis/toolkit/toolkit.html. You are encouraged to download, adopt, and adapt any information that you can use to advocate for your law library. To find strategies for applying the information about academic law libraries in the toolkit to your marketing efforts, refer to ACRL’s “Toolkit for Academic and Research Libraries” at www.ala.org/ala/pio/campaign/academicresearch/academicresearch.htm.
Toolkit authors were Carol Bredemeyer, Kristin Cheney, Virginia Kelsh, Dwight King, Ruth Levor, Susan Lewis-Sommers, and Michelle Wu. Leonette Williams coordinated the work of the bibliographers, all of whom are past or present members of SCALL. The bibliographies were compiled by Pauline S. Afuso, Paul E. Howard, Diana C. Jaque, June Kim, Tobe Liebert, Patrick Meyer, Jennifer Murray, Brian M. Raphael, Renee Y. Rastorfer, Timothy C. VonDulm, John Wilson, and George L. Wrenn.