Marketing and promotion of Library & Information services and products in the Higher Education institutions in UAE

There are different marketing strategies available to promote the library resources, services, products, and facilities. Some of the strategy primarily applied in libraries includes community surveys, innovations, publicity and public relations, advertising, communication skills, staff training and innovation, networking and pricing. The study focuses on different types of promotional activities and strategies applied by the surveyed libraries to enhance the utilization of library resources and services. Furthermore, the study tries to understand the attitude of librarians towards strategies of library products and services in the higher education institution of UAE. The study is primarily descriptive in nature with survey type method for collecting the data from the respondents. Structured questionnaire was used as data collection tool. Two sets of data involving library professionals and user community were chosen as sample population involving 100 and 250 sample size respectively. 83 responses from the library professionals and 200 questionnaires from the user’s community were analyzed using statistical tools. The findings of the study clearly showed that library users were much exposed to library resources, facility, and services in the surveyed environment by having access both physical and digital library promotional materials. A good number of IT and web enabled library use promotional activities existed in almost all the UAE higher education institutions. User satisfaction in the surveyed UAE institutions on the library resources facilities and services were encouraging while the surveyed Higher education institutions need to have a greater number of updated scholarly information resources and services. Marketing of various library services and products has emerged in a big way and going strong, particularly in the high-tech information explosion environment the present study is of very much relevant to the higher education environment