Article-Some Best Practices for Personalizing Outreach

Huwe, who is a librarian at the University of California-Berkeley, believes that the same basic rules of outreach for libraries apply today as they did in the past. What has changed is the technology used for outreach. He believes that a focus on user needs, a personal touch, and a commanding knowledge of the research challenges are the key now as then. He describes four best practices for outreach approaches:

1. Know your audience and trust your instincts. He talks about the use of blogs and the importance of crafting a blog that gives people the information they want. In addition, people need to be reminded about your blog, hopefully subscribing through RSS.

2. Decide whether to blog. Related to knowing your audience is evaluating if you should be blogging at all or just working in HTML with Web pages. In other words, know what technology is most appropriate for what you want to accomplish.

3. Build an audience-and keep on building. Marketing never ends, to be successful you must constantly monitor you blog and make it interesting.

4. Keep it simple but keep it going. To keep a professional blog you must be willing to commit to at least four blogging sessions a week.

Huwe also discusses using RSS as an outreach tool. Libraries need to move beyond just receiving and recording RSS content and into the field of becoming an RSS feed itself. “The most important strategy to apply to your feed is to ensure that it is substantive and on-point for your user community. That means going beyond topics like circulation due dates and special hours” (p. 37).

Another way to deliver information is by e-news publications. E-news outreach involves time and commitment. Alerts should be personalized to the individuals or communities you serve. In effect, the library becomes a news service providing targeted information to its audience. But to be effective it takes time to personally get to know your users.

Outreach should place the emphasis on the personal touch in the use of new technologies and build interpersonal communication with users over the long term.

Huwe, T.K. (2006, February). Some practices for personalizing outreach. Computers in Libraries, 26(1),36-38. Retrieved March 24, 2008, from Library Literature & Information Science Full Text database.