Banner Pages for Promoting Library Resources and Services

[Katherine Furlong]

To Gerry and all -

Gettysburg College's Musselman Library has a banner ad that ran on the 
College's Internal webpage (which has much greater visibility than the 
library's webpage).

The banner ad space was shared by several campus entities (including 
college life, IR, and career services) and as of this morning, the 
library's Research Paper Consultation service was still among the featured 
ads that were more or less randomly generated.  See 
http://www.gettysburg.edu/on-campus/ and reload until you come across the 
"Research Gotcha Down?" ad.

I don't have the statistics on click-throughs from the ad at my fingertips 
- but they were collected, and I could get hold of them if people were 
interested.

It was just another fun way of advertising our services!

Katherine

______________________
Katherine Furlong
Reference/Instruction Librarian
Musselman Library | Gettysburg College
kfurlong at gettysburg.edu | 717-337-6627
http://www.gettysburg.edu/~kfurlong


>On Wed, 26 Jul 2000, Gerry Mckiernan wrote:
>
> >                        _Banner Pages for Promoting Library Resources 
> and Services_
> >
> >          Earlier this week I had the pleasure of attending the 
> WiLSWorld 2000 Conference
> > [  http://www.wils.wisc.edu/wworld.html   ] in  Madison, Wisconsin and 
> had the opportunity to hear a number of *excellent* presentations. Among 
> these was a presentation by Eric Lease Morgan about his MyLibrary at NCState
> > project [http://my.lib.ncsu.edu/about/paper/index.html ] , "A Model for 
> Implementing  User-centered, Customizable Interface to a Library's 
> Collection of Information Resources ".
> >
> >     In thinking about the trend in "personalization" and 
> "customization" it occurred to me that libraries  (and universities) 
> might benefit from technologies and displays that are employed in 
> commercial sites , notably user tracking and 
> personalized/customized  banner ads for products/services.
> >
> >    In the library environment, I can envision top/side/bottom banner 
> 'ads' that promote various library services/databases/exhibit, etc. At 
> the individual level, I can envision that banner 'ads' being customized 
> to display general and specific services/databases/exhibits that would 
> high relevance to the research interest of the individual.
> >
> >    At a most basic level, the user profile could be derived from their 
> e-mail profile that at the least would include their general research 
> interest(s), e.g. Anthropology, Economics, Aerospace Engineering, 
> Computer Science, etc. At a more advanced level I can envision an 
> enhancement to the MyLibrary at NCState model such that the expressed 
> disciplines of interest are used as the basis of an interest profile. In 
> either case, upon accessing the library's homepage [either through log-in 
> or recognized IP], the page would display a series of banner 'ads' for 
> appropriate databases, workshops, new books, new journals, etc. that 
> would be of interest to the individual based on his/her user profile.
> >
> >    I'd very much appreciate learning what MyWebColleagues think about 
> the use of banner 'ads' for promoting library services in general as well 
> as the potential and pitfalls of 'personalized' banner pages. I'd be 
> particularly interested in knowing if there are currently  libraries that 
> make use of banner 'ad's as I envision.
> >
> >    As Always, Any and All comments, suggestions, insights, critiques, 
> criticisms, comments, contributions, etc are Most Welcome.
> >
> > /Gerry McKiernan
> > Theoretical Librarian
> > Iowa State University
> > Ames IA 50011
> >