Prescription for successful marketing

摘要

One year had passed since I, Sandra Kendall, had become the director of the Sidney Liswood Library at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. I had spent the time upgrading the library's electronic and print collections to ensure that they addressedthe core medical information needs of our clinicians. Now it seemed like a good time for an "annual checkup." Our resources, library services, and staff skill sets were fulfilling the baseline for a small hospital library. But how could we be better? How could we increase our visibility within the hospital? With a team of four staff members and a very limited budget, I knew that some creativity would be required. A part of my responsibilities was to contact each chief of service to find out what he or she would want from his or her medical library. (A chief of service is the senior physician in charge of a specific medical department.) We had to make sure that our library addressed the basic needs and subject specialties of this hospital. I was surprised to learn that our users were not aware of many of our new acquisitions. It became clear to me that our users needed to be reintroduced to our updated skills and services. For this hospital library to be repositioned, we had to develop a deliberate strategy for success. DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT Mount Sinai is a small, community-based, city teaching hospital with approximately 465 beds. Each department has its own subject specialty, and therefore its own unique information needs. It is easy to lose sight of the individual informationneeds of each group. Although our staff had created a comprehensive intranet site that included all of our new resources, we were receiving feedback from our patrons that they didn't know which resources they needed to use. Our users wanted to have access to their own personalized intranets as opposed to the library's all-encompassing intranet. But of course, creating individual intranets is not practical.