Free Marketing Toolkit from ProQuest

You know how your library has scads of amazing information in all sorts of great databases... but the average person doesn't know about them, understand them, or use them? Well, database vendor ProQuest is sending help! It's created a new toolkit to help you to publicize all the info goodness that's in the ProQuest Historical Newspapers collection.

Here's the news, direct from ProQuest:

ProQuest has launched a free library marketing toolkit designed specifically to help librarians create awareness about and usage of their ProQuest Historical Newspapers collection, other historical resources, and the library itself. The Historical Newspapers Marketing Toolkit includes ideas for reaching out to the user community — from the local genealogy society members to student groups on campus — and driving them to the rich resources available at the library.

“Many users start and end online research sessions with the open web,” said Lynda James-Gilboe, senior vice president of marketing and customer care for ProQuest. “Our goal is to help librarians draw users to a better starting point for relevant, reliable, and vetted information: the library, and its carefully selected e-resources.”

The Historical Newspapers Marketing Toolkit combines a wealth of "how-to" advice and print and digital marketing tools that are easy to customize. Among the program's components are:
* A white paper for ideas on how to use online historical resources to promote the library.
* Tips for using blogs, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter to promote online historical newspapers and the library.
* Customizable ProQuest Historical Newspapers™ poster
* A guide to searching ProQuest Historical Newspapers
* Descriptions of the types of content within ProQuest Historical Newspapers and examples of types of research possible within each.
* Sample Searches that demonstrate the research potential of your ProQuest Historical Newspapers collection.
* “Plain language” descriptions of ProQuest Historical Databases.
* A flier of “Five Fascinating Things to Do with Historical Newspapers”
* “Free Subscription” flier for Retroview — an entertaining quarterly e-newsletter that explores history as captured in the pages of historical newspapers.

The Historical Newspapers Marketing Toolkit is part of ProQuest's larger mission to understand the core tenets of librarianship, standing shoulder to shoulder with libraries in support of their goals. ProQuest is committed to investing in library education, honoring great educators with awards and sponsorships, supporting schools with free resources, and sharing its marketing expertise and research with libraries.

NOTE THIS (emphasis mine): The Historical Newspapers Marketing Toolkit is the seventh in a series of marketing kits from ProQuest, which include kits tailored for public, academic, corporate, K-12, and military academic and military base libraries.
The toolkit is available for free download

HERE

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Although the company itself will obviously benefit from having more people use its databases (therefore keeping them off the list of dbs that get cut from the budgets), ProQuest is still doing busy librarians a favor by showing them how to increase database usage. It's a lesson that can be carried over to other under-used online resources as well. Thanks, ProQuest!!