PLA Marketing Committee

This morning at ALA Midwinter I attended the PLA Marketing Committee meeting just to see what they were all about and what is coming up at future conferences. At the upcoming PLA conference in March in Minneapolis, the program will be "Libraries Prosper with Passion, Purpose and Persuasion: A PLA Toolkit for Success" Wow, I would LOVE to be able to go to this as it really sounds great - but there's only so much time in the year to go to conferences! During the issues discussion, I was surprised to hear how little YouTube and Flickr are still not being used. I tried to impress upon a few of the hangers on how much you can do with these tools for very little cost. I got some great ideas for Barbara Peterson who is the director of Council Bluffs Public Library on marketing library services, one of which was advertising at the local cineplex. It cost them on $3500 and this was a negotiated lower amount since the library is a non-profit entity. Before the issues discussion, the PLA president talked about the new PLA Communities of Practice which will be electronic versions of groups of committees. Personally I think PLA just needs to do away with inactive groups and focus more on the active ones! That's something I really need to look at with SCLA this year because there are some sections and round tables that are very inactive and probably just need to be done away with...