Marketing the library

Abstract

I have a confession to make. I wrote a paper, The marketing of libraries, which turned out to be a poor man's Blaise Cronin. My sin was not to ask the elementary questions of the Aslib request for my presence — namely: ‘What, when, where and why?’ Had I done so I would have got to ‘Why’ and saved myself some hours of writing and research. Why then did Aslib ask me? The answer must be that Sutton has succeeded in crashing the normally impenetrable barrier between public and special libraries. Possibly its razzmatazz, its well‐oiled publicity machine — even its maverick temerity to accept that libraries are not, and probably cannot be, ‘open and free’, may have struck a spark in your conference organising committee's consciousness.

Citation

Smith, R. (1987), "Marketing the library", Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 39 No. 9, pp. 231-233. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb051060