Marketing Your Digital Materials

Course

Questions for Your School Community and Vendors [5:46]

Learn the questions to ask your school community to better understand their capabilities
Learn how to work with vendors to determine the right digital tools for your budget
Learn ideas about tools and features that would make digital databases easier to share

Just to kind of frame a little bit, I took some of this information from a webinar that I did for School Library Connection and I think it was almost a year and a half or two years ago, which seems I can't believe it's that long ago, on how to market your digital tools and that was mainly with e-books and audio books. So we were talking mostly fiction. With research, it's nonfiction. So there's a lot of things that correlate and then there's some nuances that you can kind of add to that piece when you're adding nonfiction.

So some of the questions that I had for the audience members of that webinar that I think we should reflect a little on also is just when we're thinking about how do we market our tools and actually even which tools are we choosing to use for which purposes? So what devices are available? We have to think about network capabilities, knowing that there's still a lot of inequity across school districts and towns and states. And after COVID happened, I think this has really come to the forefront for a lot of us, and maybe solutions have been put into place and maybe we still have a lot of concerns. This also goes with that. Do students have connectivity at home? And this becomes a huge issue when we are trying to figure out when we teach. I know in my district we utilize the state databases a lot, but some kids can't access it at home because they need a library card. So you have to think about those connectivity issues. And if you're using one of the ABC Clio databases, how are students logging in? And that was actually one of the questions that came through on that opening survey as well as that was a frustration, just logging in sometimes. How many people are actually using these things? And this is where the marketing comes in. I know that a lot of us feel like people don't even know what we have and we spend money on subscriptions that never really get fully utilized. And so how can we sort of address that?

And then what are people's attitudes towards reading and listening to digital tools? Again, this was originally in the context of those audio and e-books. But when we look at digital tools and nonfiction collection and e-books, what is our community feel about that? We always are talking in the fiction world about how people prefer print, often after surveys are done and I kind of push back a little bit on that and say, even though that might be true, what people feel now, I feel like part of it is because we're just not used to those digital e-books or the audio books or the databases can you could lump it into that, also. They just don't know how to navigate them and they don't see the purpose because they don't know how to use all the tools that come with them.

So those are some questions for the school community. And then when we think about vendors, so we have choices in what we choose to purchase with budget money. But we also have some things that we know we're looking for that helps us decide which to choose. So these are some questions that I think about when choosing what I might choose from my district. So are they integrated with your library platform? Do they provide access to multi-user titles? Are the resources available offline or do students need a connection? And then in the case of e-books, are they able to be downloaded and shared? And in the case of databases, are we able to share something that again, that are they available offline? Can we save that as something that can be stored in drive or as a file and then shared.

So one of the things that I'm curious about is, maybe not so much what would make digital databases easier to share, but what does make them easier to share? So what tools or features would you love or you do love to see added to digital databases that make them easier to share? So make a post-it by just clicking that and typing something, or you can text a text answer. And then I just want to see if there's anything out there that people are doing or using again, how do you get people to know what you have access to? So single sign is a huge thing, and some of you might, I don't know if Clever and ClassLink is more for elementary, but I know that's something else that other schools use if they don't use Google. So thank you to the brave soul, let's see is anybody else on a different note? Yep, single sign on goes with that excellent. Oh, collection, collections to share with other teachers, oh and good job. (Oh, I thought you changed the color. You can change the color also, if you like those three little dots.) Phone app. Yep that makes it much more accessible, especially for our high school students, and middle school, who are often on their phones. And whoever put collections to share with teachers, do you use Destiny collections, what are you within the database itself are you using? Lots of, yep, export of citations to noodle tools, I love that feature. Yep, sharing, and I think I know that the history database, you are able to do both of these things to push to the Google Classroom and to export. So eep adding, if you have other ideas, keep adding; and if you're not really sure, that's also probably partly why you're here, because you're hoping to get some tips on that.

Making Digital Databases Easier to Share

Your library could be full of amazing digital databases filled with knowledge that your students and teachers would benefit from. But if they don't know they have access to them, how can they use them?

RESOURCES:

Course Packet

REFLECT & PRACTICE:

In this lesson, Melissa Thom talks about making digital databases easier to share with your teachers and students. How are you spreading the word in your library to make your learning community aware of what they have access to? Using page 2 of the Course Packet found in the Resources above, brainstorm and come up with a plan to market digital databases that you currently have. Maybe make a plan to get the word out about a database that you are hoping to gain access to, creating interest and excitement around it, and perhaps persuading the decision makers.

MLA Citation

Thom, Melissa. "Marketing Your Digital Materials: Making Digital Databases Easier to Share." School Library Connection, August 2021, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2267075?learningModuleId=2267071&topicCenterId=2247903.

Entry ID: 2267074

Additional Resources

Bibliography.

About the Author

Melissa Thom, MA, (she/her) is a teacher librarian at Bristow Middle School in West Hartford, CT. She spent 12 years teaching grades four to six as a classroom teacher, and eight years ago she earned her library media specialist certification. She is the president of the Connecticut Association of School Librarians, a 2019 AASL Social Media Superstar Reader Leader finalist, and a 2022 Library Journal Mover and Shaker.

MLA Citation

Thom, Melissa. "Marketing Your Digital Materials. Questions for Your School Community and Vendors [5:46]." School Library Connection, ABC-CLIO, August 2021, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2267075?learningModuleId=2267071&topicCenterId=2247903.

View all citation styles

https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2267075?learningModuleId=2267071&topicCenterId=2247903

Entry ID: 2267075