Library Newsletters: Are They Worth it?

Abstract

Introduction: Academic and hospital health libraries serve a diverse set of users some who may be distributed across a wide geographic range and never physically set foot in the library. it is essential that libraries find effective ways to communicate their programs, resources, and services online. At Institution X we send out a newsletter to subscribers once a month highlighting, among other things, upcoming training sessions, new resources, and relevant or interesting items. However, with the wide variety of other communication tools now available (social media, websites, listservs) is a newsletter still the best way to communicate with our users?

Methods: An online survey using Survey Monkey will be distributed to over 1,000 subscribers to determine their satisfaction with the newsletter. Subscribers include students, residents, professional health care workers, faculty, staff, and researchers from a large academic institution and its affiliated healthcare hospitals and health centres. Usage statistics generated by Mail Chimp and WordPress will also be analyzed.

Results: The survey will be distributed in early 2018 and results presented at the conference.

Discussion: The majority of Canadian health facility libraries use newsletters to communicate with their users, and the amount of staff time dedicated to creating, maintaining, and distributing them is not insignificant. In times of fiscal restraint across libraries, is that effort sustainable? The results of this study are intended to help guide the decision-making process at one institution, but can hopefully be applied to any library that produces a newsletter.