Strategies for Planning and Promoting Library Services to New Users

A team of academic librarians is using a set of common strategies – assessment, advocacy and advertisement - to develop and enhance health information services and programs to an urban campus community and beyond. As a means of meeting the challenge of disseminating and promoting a large number of new information resources and skills to current library patrons and to new user populations, these strategies inform a refocused program for on-site library instruction, a current health information outreach initiative and planning for a new health outreach initiative. By sharing the methods and results of these strategies in consort with a high level of collaboration among librarians and by forging new partnerships with organizations outside of the library, librarians can efficiently manage the challenge of expanded clientele expectations. Taken together, these activities are promising practices that may be especially useful for planning new programs. This paper will describe the representative programs and the purposes of the strategies employed to enhance existing programs and to develop new ones