It seems the week to discover interesting posts/articles - well for me anyway.
This morning I stumbled across this: Patience (and Marketing) Makes the Audience Grow Fonder
This article discusses how to market libraries most invisible resources - our online databases.
Database usage is something my library is about to investigate quite deeply - now that we have someone in the position to do it. So it is fitting for me to read the above article with interest.
However, while the article does offer some good ideas, I've always wondered why, especially with journal databases, libraries are not supplied with catalogue records for all the journals that are contained within the database.
I realise that many will want to search a database by subject and get articles from a number of journals, but many of the databases we subscribe to have many lifestyle/scientific etc journals that some people may be interested in only looking at that particular title.
Also, if a library user searches the library catalogue for a particular journal title, then at least they know we hold it, rather than having to search both the library catalogue and try to find a list of journal titles on a database page.
Our library does have a federated search option - to search across all the databases and the library catalogue - but it is a bit clunky.
So what can we do to make our databases more visible to our library users?
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