Communications Committee Meeting Minutes

November 16, 2006

Present: Paula Covington, Angel (Bruner) Craddock, Tracy Primich, Henry Shipman, Suellen Stringer-hye, Celia Walker, Ava Wilson

Agenda:

Marketing Plan:
Celia presented a spreadsheet of prioritized audiences, their needs and library resources/services that address those needs which the committee has already completed. During this meeting, the members of the committee identified the needs for the remaining prioritized audiences. We pinpointed the recipients as follows: Library Staff, Alumni, Board of Trust, Deans and VU Administration. We reviewed items and suggested potential need solutions. Key areas are listed below:

Library Staff
Professional Development
Training pages
ElementK – Formally named Horizon
Entertainment Leisure Reading
Research resources
Technical support from LITS, training pages and ElementK\\ meeting rooms
Publishing info (if they want to publish an article)
Retirement information

Alumni
Remote Access – direct them to the alumni page
BIS (Business Information Service)
Parking – Parking desk information
Inform class members, archive information
ILL (Interlibrary Loan)
Life Long Learning – RL classes
Book group information – Ask us alumni pages
Alumni Reunion
FOL – (provides them w/info about the libraries)
New reading material

Board of Trust/Scholars
Borrowing privileges
Exposure to the library – Tours of new things –

  Exhibits
Acorn Chronicle
Holiday Cards

Deans

Happy Faculty – testimonials
Financial accountability
Research Assistants
Knowledgeable Staff
News about library
Instruction programs
Need liaisons for their own research
Assistant Deans need photos/archives

VU Administration
Research Assistants
Happy faculty, Deans
Information from the Archives
Need the library to look good to attract students/faculty

Book Bags: New Design

These bags are given to users in bad weather to carry books. We need to reorder, so this is a good time to discuss the design. Celia sent committee members design options sent by Creative Services. However, the design issue led the committee to a discussion of our library logo. In recent years, we’ve been asked to steer away from the old Heard logo to something more like the Vanderbilt logo. This is a strategic issue, since we want to align the library and its products with the university mission.

Celia presented examples of the logos used by each of the schools. Suellen stressed the need to have a full logo, not just the name of the library, so that we would have an element to use in all of the different ways we need logo recognition (book bags, web pages, book marks, etc.). There is confusion on campus about the Heard name: many feel that the GLB is the Heard Library and every other library has its own name. We want to establish the library’s system-wide identity. The committee recommended that we follow the style used by the colleges of the VU mark followed by the name “Library”, “Libraries” or “Library System”, with “The Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries” noted elsewhere. Celia will suggest this to the Strategy and Planning Council group and we will hopefully have an answer at our next meeting.

Next meeting: Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action (AIDA) and identify products and services that address needs of our audiences.

~Prepared by Ava Wilson, November 20, 2006~