How to make the most of special collections!

Halloween in the Library, Oct. 31

Special Open House and "Eeks-ibit" for Duke Students

When: Monday, Oct. 31, 11 a.m. - 1 p.m.
Where: Rare Book Room, Perkins Library

Stop by the Rare Book Room between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. and celebrate Halloween with the staff of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

We'll be dragging out some of the creepiest and most macabre items from the shadowy depths of the library's vaults. Among the many strange and gruesome items on display will be cases of glass eyeballs from our History of Medicine Collections, Renaissance-era amputating saws, horror comics from the 1950s and 1960s, the earliest known illustration of Frankenstein’s monster, a letter signed by Bela Lugosi, centuries-old treatises on witchcraft, apparitions, the supernatural, and much, much more. All of these items are part of the library's special collections, although they are seldom seen by light of day.

This event is free and open to the living and the dead. There will be candy.

Marketing the academic library world

This one is on marketing academic libraries in a web 2 world – pretty much everything you need to think about!

Social media use in the library

The Journal of Academic Librarianship
Volume 37, Issue 5, September 2011, Pages 373-375
Guest editorial: Social Media, Academic Research and the Role of University Libraries

from the conclusion: "...the real value of social media for libraries lies in its marketing potential, and marketing is something that libraries are not very good at. Thus one of the biggest university users of social media in the UK (not represented in the focus groups) uses Facebook and Twitter quite successfully for this purpose. Social media add powerful (‘cool’) communication channels to the marketing mix and appeal to the strategic student group. Whether it would appeal to researchers is of course another thing. So the real issue isn't that libraries are failing to understanding social media per se but failing to understand its effectiveness in their marketing strategy overall, and this is why many of them are not really connecting with social media. .."