Thursday, April 26, 2007

If you don't know a librarian, you should

Christopher Kenton wrote:
My wife is a librarian. If you don’t know a librarian, you should...

When I look at the library profession, exemplified at large by the American Library Association, I see a profession that is fully engaged with society and with their peers. They don’t always get everything right, but they’re on the ball.
(Thanks to Melvin for alerting me to the post.)

The real point of Christopher's post was how marketeers in the US, and the American Marketing Association, should also re-brand itself like what US libraries did.

I bet his post will get him quite a bit of attention from librarians in the US :)

It's interesting to me because here's a marketeer using libraries as a benchmark for brand positioning. Granted he's talking about libraries in the US, and the American Library Association (ALA) is a influential and respected organisation worldwide. But generally speaking libraries aren't usually associated as powerhouses of branding and image marketing.

Or have we libraries and librarians, just experienced a paradigm shift and we don't even know it?

Heh.

3 comments:

  1. You might have this experience before - when we attend courses outside the library and we need to introduce ourselves, the other course mates would inadvertantly crowd round you and find out what exactly a librarian does. Saying you are a librarian is a good conversational starter everywhere. ('V')

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  2. Well, I think that libraries can be cool and Singapore libraries have certainly re-invented themselves. Now the next step is to make museums the icon of hip and happening, and somehow I am quite confident that we will get there.... ;)

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  3. Very interesting, but I took the article to be more about how we are as a professional body - rather than how we appear to potential users (i.e. brand). As a librarian from the UK, I'd be interested to hear how libraries in Singapore are viewed...Thanks

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