From: "David P. Dillard" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2017 00:18:56 -0500

I have worked in our library for many years and thirty of those years
I also worked in retail department store as a sales associate.  This
has caused me to pay far more attention to what goes on in retail
stores than would have happened if I did not have years of retail
experience.  This type of event may be dwindling, but is still around
and in years past was very much present.  If one visits at the right
time, like Saturday morning or afternoon in a supermarket or places
like Sams Club, Costco or BJs, one sees free product sampling
stations, often done by the companies making that product.

Why not encourage publishers to visit the library with some staff and
either on the library selling floor or in the auditorium have
discussions of their books or lessons in the online databases they
vend. To encourage attendance they can offer a six month ten or twenty
percent discount on some or all of their books that they have in their
catalog. Such events should be well advertised. Libraries could
consider subsidizing these visits if that will make for a better
chance of publishers doing these product demos and it can be a
learning experience for those attending including students, faculty
and librarians.

In retail stores suggestive selling and persistant product talks by
sales associates are aimed at getting the client to make additional
purchases often with money they do not have.  In libraries the same
kind of approaching the customer (students do pay tuition and taxes)
is a benign attempt to improve the students skills, contribute to
student retention and get them better grades, so twist away at those
arms to get them to use the library's products, they need the
pressure.  Without powerful marketing retail sales levels decline.
Library use should improve with strong promotion of the product in any
ways possible and with an aggressive library sales force (librarians
and other library staff) interacting with students and looking for
ways to get an intitial contact such as a simple greeting and building
that into ways I or we can help you.

Sincerely,
David Dillard
Temple University
(215) 204 - 4584
[log in to unmask]



On Thu, 26 Jan 2017, LIBLICENSE wrote:

> From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2017 19:42:34 -0700
>
> Tony, you provoke a story.  When I was first introduced to the staff
> at ASU I told them what I still tell them.  Think about how you would
> proceed if the library were a business that monetized every
> transaction:  every search, every consult, every web page served,
> every circulation transaction, every ILL, whatever.  (Then I
> interrupted myself to reassure them that, no, we weren't going to
> monetize everything!)  But think, I said, what you would do in that
> case to push product.  What would you do to maximize revenue from
> transactions?  Whatever the answer to that question might be:  that's
> what we should be doing.  We're not in it for the money, but we're in
> it because we believe we have The Good Stuff, the high quality,
> curated, peer-reviewed, significant, factual, truthful, provocative,
> cutting-edge stuff and we believe that it's in our users' interest for
> us to be as successful as possible in helping them find what they need
> in order to be amazingly successful in their academic work.
>
> We've all got a long way to go to make that happen, but I strongly
> believe it's what we have to do and who we have to be.  We're doing a
> major building redesign now and we're going to put special collections
> on the main floor.  A nineteen-year-old coming into the building to do
> their calculus homework is going to see something that's new to them
> and that piques their curiosity into coming back and going for more:
> the equivalent of putting the cosmetics counter at the entrance to the
> department store from the mall.  If we push product successfully,
> we'll be valued and valuable for a long time.  Fail in that mission
> and we all lose.
>
> P.S. wouldn't it be interesting if more publishers and vendors thought
> the same way about the products they push to libraries?
>
> Thanks for the prompt,
> Jim O'Donnell
> ASU
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 3:42 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>>
>> From: Tony Sanfilippo <[log in to unmask]>
>> Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2017 21:04:57 -0500
>>
>> This issue fascinates me because it touches on the intersection of
>> librarianship and bookselling. In bookselling what you're talking
>> about has a name. It's called merchandising. That refers to the
>> display of new products in a way that brings attention to them. In
>> bookselling it can be controversial because there are monetary rewards
>> available for merchandising in the form of a practice called co-op,
>> where a publisher pays a bookseller to augment the cost of advertising
>> in local media with the bookseller, or the publisher pays for
>> prominent placement in the bookseller's store, or on the bookseller's
>> website (yes, that website).
>>
>> What fascinates me about this issue is the reluctance of librarians to
>> take on an editorial role. In the case of the bookseller, they can
>> choose whether the promotion of a title is ultimately in the best
>> interest of the store and if they're willing to make the Faustian
>> bargain behind a co-op agreement because they ultimately feel that
>> what they're promoting is in sync with what the store is saying about
>> its stock.This economic dilemma, taking money from the supplier, isn't
>> an issue for the librarian.
>>
>> For librarians, it's an entirely different matter and the ethics of
>> librarianship seem to frown on the kind of editorial and marketing
>> decisions that bring attention to its collections' foci. Librarians
>> seem to value objective discovery over their own informed
>> recommendations.
>>
>> While this might seem like a leap, I think that ethos (which I find
>> librarians also bring to their publishing efforts,) doesn't serve them
>> well. They have long been wise and trusted gatekeepers. Why is it when
>> the rubber hits the road they take a step back and defer to the patron
>> and insist the patron is best served by offering a largely unedited
>> variety of choices rather than also offering an opinion on the quality
>> of the options? That is what a good bookseller is doing when he
>> merchandises. Why is that so antithetical to the mission of the
>> library? Isn't the inability to discern what's worth paying attention
>> to how we got where we are today? Shouldn't those of us who can
>> discern the difference between the wheat and the chaff being doing
>> more to promote the wheat?
>>
>> Best,
>> Tony
>>
>> Tony Sanfilippo, Director
>> Ohio State University Press
>> 180 Pressey Hall
>> 1070 Carmack Road
>> Columbus, OH 43210-1002
>> ohiostatepress.org
>> (614) 292-7818