Marketing via social media

Polar marketing with a sense of humour, Norwegian Meteorological Station,
Jan Mayen (Polar adventurer, June 2010)

Roughly translated this reads: Theory is when you understand everything but nothing works. Practice is when everything works, but nobody understands why. On this station, we combine theory and practice - nothing works and nobody understands why!

I plan to continue marketing special collections at the Centre of South Asian studies and RCS library via the SAALG blog and via RSS feeds, as well as via our web pages and catalogues, and at meetings, conferences and workshops. I have found online exhibitions a particularly good way of marketing the collections as people can link to them via their blogs, web pages, Camtools sites, Facebook pages and even tweet about them.   I hope to produce more joint exhibitions with academic colleagues especially.

I am also participating in this year's Open Cambridge/Open Library weekend, with a 'Glimpse of India' - an opportunity for the public to view photographs, art work and home movies shot in Indian 1911-1956, and listen to archive recordings in which men an women reflect on events and issues they experienced during that period.

The University's Press Office helped market our home movies, by assisting us in creating a promotional filmed interview.  I may also create RCS and CSAS photostreams on Flickr to assist with the identification of people and places on old photographs in the collections.

All the above tried methods have resulted in increased interest and use in our collections.  However it is becoming increasing difficult to cope with this increased use - the down-side of too much marketing at a time of budget restraint.

PS I have just heard that the RCS collections will appear in the credits of Who Do You Think You Are? this evening - tracing Rupert Penry-Jones' family roots to India - photographs from the Queen Mary photograph collection on India.