Marketing of library services and products

There are different marketing strategies are available to promote the library resources, services, products, and facilities. In the marketing strategies some of the strategy such as community surveys, innovations, publicity and public relations, advertising, communication skills, staff training and innovation, networking and pricing are marketing strategies adopted to know the librarians’ views on marketing strategies. This study is quantitative analysis of various libraries across UAE in higher education pertaining to the various marketing and promotion strategies of their products and services. The study focuses on different types of promotional activities and strategies followed by the surveyed libraries to enhance the utilization of library resources and services. Furthermore, the study tries to understand the attitude of librarians towards strategies of library products and services in the higher education institution of UAE The study is primarily descriptive in nature with survey type method for collecting the data from the respondents. To collect data, census methods was applied for collecting the data from the library professionals and convenient sampling was used to collect the data from the users. Structured questionnaire was used as data collection tool. Two sets of data involving library professionals and user community were chosen as sample population involving 100 and 250 sample size respectively. 83 responses from the library professionals and 200 questionnaires from the user’s community were analysed using statistical tools. The findings of the study clearly showed that library users were much exposed to library resources, facility, and services in the surveyed environment by having access both physical and digital library promotional materials. A good number of IT and web enabled library use promotional activities existed in almost all the UAE higher education institutions. Half of the libraries in the surveyed environment do have marketing division in their organizational chart. User satisfaction in the surveyed UAE institutions on the library resources facilities and services were encouraging while the surveyed Higher education institutions need to have a greater number of updated scholarly information resources and services, particularly the high-end peer reviewed research journals. Library marketing is being one of the upcoming and prominent areas of library and information sciences research, particularly in the high-tech information explosion environment the present study is of very much relevant to the higher education environment.