Please note: I presented my findings for this project during the Annual Medical Library Association Meeting in May 2022 titled, “Communicating the Value of the Medical Library Early and Often at a School of Public Health.” View the original slide deck from this presentation on Zenodo here. 

In graduate and professional schools, marketing and public relations teams generally try to accomplish three goals: attract prospective students, retain current students by highlighting campus life and the school’s achievements, and maintain support from alumni. Part of a librarian’s daily work is to serve the information needs of current students, faculty, and researchers by teaching database search techniques, supporting scholarly publishing, lending digital and physical resources, and more.  

Can these two seemingly separate departments align their efforts in some way? Could stellar library services attract a prospective student to a certain school of public health? I think so! Which is why I embarked on a project with the following goals in mind: 

• To explore whether schools of public health view their subject-specific library services as a “selling point” for admissions on their websites. 

• To inspire and empower Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) to promote library services to prospective and current students through its website. 

Inspiration 

In the fall of 2021, following a reorganization of the Yale School of Public Health’s public relations and marketing team, I took the opportunity to introduce myself and my public health librarian colleague, Kate Nyhan, to their new team members. These strategic introductions gave us the opportunity to brainstorm how library services can be more thoroughly incorporated into the YSPH messaging aimed at prospective students, current students, and alumni.  

I was particularly interested in whether the public relations and marketing team would consider dedicating an area of the YSPH website to library offerings. To get a better idea of how this implementation might look, the public relations and marketing team asked me to investigate if and how our peers highlighted library services on their sites.  

Environmental Scan 

I began an environmental scan in October 2021 where I analyzed six schools of public health to see if and how they communicated library services on their websites. I chose six schools that YSPH considers to be their peer institutions, based on size, tuition cost, course offerings, and other factors. I was especially interested in recording each school’s observed marketing strategy, as well as whether the institutions’ libraries had a dedicated public health liaison librarian and whether the library and/or a public health librarian were mentioned on the schools’ website. 

Findings 

• Two of the six schools mention the library on their website. 

• Only one school mentions the subject expertise of its public health liaison librarian. 

• Five of the six schools appear to have dedicated public health librarians (as indicated by their titles in library staff directories). 

I noticed that each school had statistics and colorful data visualizations on their admissions pages, and my immediate thought was that library services should be presented in this way, too! Around the time I was studying websites, I also started drafting a list of the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library’s services that add value to the student experience and more broadly support research efforts of YSPH constituents. For example, students have access to 15 libraries across the Yale campus, over 22,000 electronic biomedical journals, thousands of online resources, and two public health librarians. Plus, MPH students collectively generate an average of 60 publications per year. 

In December of 2021, I shared the list and the findings of my environmental scan during a YSPH public relations and marketing team meeting. The assistant dean enthusiastically asked if I could compile the information and develop marketing language for the school’s three audiences – prospective students, current students, and alumni. The list I had already been drafting was a perfect foundation for these messages. I shared the updated content with the public relations and marketing team, and excitingly, it now exists on a new page of the YSPH website under Admissions & Financial Aid > Student Life & Academic Support > Libraries at Yale. 

Recommendations 

If you wish to strengthen your library’s relationship with the public relations and marketing team of the school or department you serve, the first thing you might consider is emailing the marketing staff to make introductions and set up a meeting. This will help both parties align missions while also building rapport. Next, try using concrete statistics to communicate the abundance of resources and support your library offers, especially those that are specifically designed to serve your user group(s). Finally, think about ways you might market subject-specific library services beyond web presence. For example, we provide library content for two YSPH-managed monthly newsletters that go out to different sub-audiences at our school.  

Copyright license: CC-BY-NC-SA  

Author Bio: Kayla Del Biondo is the Simbonis Librarian for Public Health at Yale’s Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library. She is passionate about instruction and outreach, experienced in customer service and 1:1 research consultations, and a firm believer in creativity in information retrieval. She is especially interested in social justice efforts in professional sports, art and community health, mental health awareness, and longevity research. 

DCT Featured Article - December 13, 2022