Slashdotting Digital Library Resources
James A. Buczynski · Internet Reference Services Quarterly · 2006
Libraries' information consumer market share continues to freefall, despite the opportunities that have emerged with the arrival of the Information Age. We've built digital libraries, offering access to immense digital collections of quality resources, and online service desks staffed by skilled experts, and the crowds are not coming. Marketing missteps are largely to blame for the declining role of libraries in people's lives. There is an awareness gap between the offering of digital libraries and the communities they serve. Referral marketing, modeled on blogs like Slashdot, is the key to increasing traffic to licensed digital library resources. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology offers new opportunities to broadcast continually fresh digital library content to popular community websites.