Marketing partnerships in Greece between libraries, archives and museums. A new age has just started

Abstract

Our paper includes a proposed model for Marketing partnerships in Greece between libraries, archives and museums related to statistics according to the Greek public and academic libraries and museums. We demonstrate evaluation practices and mainly best-practice and "best-vision" strategy encouraging the improvement in the provision of electronic services not only in Greece but in a generally implemented framework. Greece is making a great effort to achieve a continuous improvement of the libraries' services. The paper aims to demystify marketing for librarians. Practical solutions are provided on how to implement a marketing strategy, with particular emphasis on the value of using electronic information resources inside a "comfortable" partnership between libraries, archives and museums. It also shows the link between promoting library services and raising the profile of the similar cultural organizations. In an age where we need to compete among the myriad of Internet content providers and fight for the limited attention span of our library patrons, marketing and promotion of our services are paramount to our best well-being. While special libraries may tailor their services to their specific target audience, public libraries and academic libraries, by definition, is catered to the general public and to the big academic and student community at large. Because of their heterogeneous market, satisfying the customers' needs of libraries, museums and archives can be very challenging. So, with the active collaboration with The Greek Ministry of Education and especially with The Special Secretary for Libraries and Archives, we gathered statistics and attention is given to the following parameters: 1. Promotion: 2. Understanding Customer's Needs 3. Community Profiling And as a consequence designing: 1. Market Segmentation 2. Marketing Plan 3. Marketing Audit 4. Objectives and Strategies A good marketing plan begins with a mission statement that defines the objectives of the library or the information centre, which includes an identification of the target market segments. Realistic and measurable targets set should be subjected to ongoing evaluation process as part of the marketing plan, and used to adjust or revise the marketing activities. Evaluations can be in the form of official measurement systems including financial accounting, computerized usage tracking, user satisfaction surveys, or the less structured methods of verbal or written feedback from users. As librarians we should be actively marketing and promoting our services. The basic aim of marketing is to know and understand our users in order that the cooperative schema is able to satisfy those needs in an effective way. A marketing plan is an essential tool which will enable us to focus our efforts. The market plan should assess where you are now (market research), where you are going (objectives) and how you are going to get there (strategies).