[WEB4LIB] RE: marketing, lobbying, and vendors

[Karen Coyle]

On Sat, 2004-11-20 at 10:42, Jesse Ephraim wrote:

> Precisely.  Librarians should become more aggressive when dealing with
> vendors, too, demanding more appropriate features in software products
> and refusing to pay the initial asking price and maintenance fees for
> them.  There is room to bargain with any vendor.  When I first became a
> librarian (after years as a programmer) I was shocked to see how many
> libraries pay the first price a vendor throws at them.

I don't see advocating for libraries and bargaining for lower prices to
be clearly related. We nickle and dime our vendors to an amazing degree,
and then we end up settling for poorly designed products more often than
not. I'd rather see libraries pay full price and insist on quality. 

As a matter of fact, one of the things that libraries will need to do in
order to advocate is to learn to spend money, and for something that is
intangible. Some librarians who are real go-getters seem to show us that
you can bring in more money but first you have to spend some and take
some risks, but most seem to be focused on just getting by with
ridiculously small budgets, day to day. In my mind, the problem isn't
that we don't know how to do marketing, but that so many librarians have
withdrawn into a poverty mentality (and not all that unreasonable given
the years of budget cuts) that they themselves don't see anything that
they can market.

The whole darn profession needs an institutional strength prozac. A
couple of billion dollars wouldn't hurt, either.
-- 
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Karen Coyle
Digital Library Specialist
http://www.kcoyle.net
Ph: 510-540-7596 Fax: 510-848-3913
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