Presentation given by Julie Cleverley from Leeds Metropolitan University at the PPRG seminar in Birmingham on 8 November 2013.

1. Targeted marketing strategies that work
CILIP’s Publicity and Public Relations (PPRG) Group
Discover The Library!
Libraries and Learning Innovation,
Leeds Metropolitan University
Julie Cleverley
Journals and Electronic Resources Manager

2. Leeds Metropolitan University
• c 3000 staff and 26000 students
• 2 campus libraries - City campus and Headingley
campus
• 1.4 million visits to the libraries per year
• 450,000 books and e-resources including c90000
journals
• 99% of journal titles available electronically

3. Resource Discovery Project
• ‘make journals easier to find’ (2010 annual
student survey)
• ‘problems finding journals (need one access
point) but amount of info that is available is
good’ (2010 exit polls)
• ‘online journals hard to navigate, and the
process of actually finding a journal article
difficult.’ (2009 focus group)

4. Discover
- EBSCO Discovery Service
• Content – high percentage of EBSCO resources at
Leeds Met
• User interface – EDS preferred in our evaluations
• Admin interface – for both stats and customisation
• Customer service – EBSCO has good track record
with us
• Fast & simple implementation….
• Soft launch – September 2011
• Main/Full launch – January 2012

5. Promoting Discover 2012-13
Project objectives:
• To raise awareness of Discover.
• To encourage usage of Discover by
Library staff, academic staff and students
• To increase usage of specific databases
accessed via Discover

6. To raise awareness of Discover

7. Marketing Materials

8. Promotion to Library Staff
• Discover Project and Implementation
group
• Naming the new service competition
• Discover training hours
• “Resource of the Month” training hours
• Pens given to Library staff

9. Promotion to Academic Staff
• Staff invited to demos, focus groups and the
launch event
• University wide enews bulletins
• News items throughout the year

10. Promotion to Academic Staff
• University’s annual Course Leader Conference in summer
2012
• University wide new staff induction sessions promoting
Discover and highlighting features such as permalinks for use
in online module handbooks and on the VLE
• Publicity on the Staff and
Researcher pages of the
Library Online website

11. Promotion to Postgraduates
and Researchers
• Advanced Discover guide
• More in depth searches, depth of results
• How they can be managed - RSS feeds, exporting results
to Endnote and RefWorks and creating bibliographies
• Personalisation – creating folders and changing
preferences

12. Promotion to Students
• Library inductions
• Promotional materials given away at the
Library Help and Information Point
• Discover: Your Library search engine Skills for Learning workshops

13. Promotion to students:
Fresher’s Fair

14. Promotion to Students:
subject specific search boxes

15. Promotion to Students:
Discover road shows

16. Promotion to Students:
news items
• Discover your Library? – news article
on the University’s website
• Promotion to Students via topical news items

17. What’s new library display

18. Evaluating awareness
• Anecdotal evidence collected at road shows
• 2013-14 Reading lists more closely related to the
Library collections
• Featured in the university-wide “You said we did” for
2012 NSS
• 2013 NSS results - comments about resources had
decreased and positive comments up 18%
• Mentioned in course reviews, teaching sessions and
one-to-ones: "a brilliant tool which made searching for
specific work much easier and less time-consuming".
• Praised by the Students’ Union Executive as an
example of how the Library listens to and responds to
the needs of students.

19. Discover – usage statistics

20. Discover – usage statistics
A comparison of monthly searches
on Discover in 2011-12 and 2012-13
A comparison of monthly sessions
on Discover in 2011-12 and 2012-13

21. To increase usage of specific
databases accessed via Discover
Other subscribed databases
EBSCO databases
%age increase in full text downloads
between 2011-12 and 2012-13
Academic Search Complete
5%
Art Full Text
206%
Business Source Premier
37%
CINAHL Plus Full Text
179%
PsycArticles
13%
Sport Discus
15%
%age increase in full text downloads
(JR1) and successful section requests
(BR2) between 2011-12 and 2012-13
Annual Reviews
50%
Berg Publishers
49%
BioMed Central
76%
BMJ
6%
Brill
24%
Cambridge University Press
33%
DawsonEra (BR2)
79%
MyILibrary (BR2)
305%
Nature Publishing Group
17%
Springer
132%
Taylor & Francis
21%

22. Conclusions
•
•
•
•
Successful marketing campaign
Met objectives
Engaged those delivering and receiving
Relatively inexpensive

23. What’s next?
• Resource list system – linking to Discover
• Annual review of Discover
• Embedded promotion of Discover in
student inductions and by all staff on the
front line services
• Embedding of LibGuides into Discover
profile