Page 16 - Journal of Library Science in China 2020 Vol.46

RAO Quan / Review and outlook on the problems of library transformation 015

users’ behavior data by means of big data to provide customized services; 4) To free librarians
from repetitive operations via AI equipment and systems to do more creative work. All of these
deserve more thoughts.

2.3 The lack of marketing and means limiting the library’s social influence

In the Internet Age, marketing has become a popular way to improve recognition and public trust
of products or brands. “Good wine also needs bush.” Without good marketing, it is difficult for
commercial products and cultural brands to get the public attention and recognition. Thus as a
significant part for the public to get to know the library, library marketing has been advocated and
valued by the library community to attract potential users, push high-quality services and realize
social benefit. Some scholars abroad pointed out that the difference between good libraries and
those that did not achieve their goals was the quality of their marketing (Leisner, 1995). Both
the American Library Association (ALA) and the Chartered Institute of Library and Information
Professionals (CILIP) set up marketing awards. In 2012 IFLA also set up the International
Marketing Award to encourage the library to do marketing. Some Chinese libraries won the awards
in the past few years.
The NMC Horizon Report: 2017 Library Edition (Becker, Cummis, Divis, Freeman, Hall,
& Ananthanarayanan, 2017) released in early 2017 regarded marketing as one of the most key
challenges of the library. The IFLA Global Vision Report (2018) revealed that the value of
libraries not understood by funders and stakeholders had become the most pressing challenge and
even decided the existence and development of the library. The report paid a special emphasis
on the importance of marketing on the librarianship. The marketing ideas in the Chinese library
community are generally lacking. Most libraries have no intention to market. The influence of the
overall library marketing is so slim that the public are even not aware of the nearby libraries, let
alone the various free reading services. Nevertheless, museums have walked into the public lives
through new marketing means such as cultural and creative products, movies and TV programs
and interactive games, which arouses the public’s enthusiasm for fine traditional Chinese culture.
The documentary film Masters in the Forbidden City even evoked the passion of applying for
vacancies in museums among the younger generation. As far as fans of Tmall stores of cultural
and creative products are concerned, the Palace Museum had 3.19 million, the National Museum
of China had 1.08 million, and even Suzhou Museum which just went online in 2018 had 0.23
million. However, as of October 2019, the Tmall flagship store of the Alliance of Cultural and
Creative Products Development of Libraries had only 8,000 fans. Furthermore, we also fall far
behind from the perspective of number, variety, public praise, design and promotion plans of
cultural and creative products.
Different from business marketing, the library marketing is to take strategic actions with marking
ideas to win more understanding and support from the society to enhance the library’s influence.