If it's happening in Kenya...

Something funny: a cursory search resulted in an article about marketing library services in Kenya. Check out the reasons cited for the need of marketing in university libraries:

We can identify four basic reasons why university libraries in Kenya need to adapt a strategic marketing approach:

1. (1) declining level of budgetary support;
2. (2) increased competition from other sources of information such as the Internet;
3. (3) changes in educational system; and
4. (4) changes in information technology (Kavulya 2003).

This article also mentions that fund reduction was because (in summary) stakeholders were "receiving no direct personal benefit from library collections". Sounds familiar.

Seems like the same problems are occurring worldwide, and NOT just in Africa. Though the author acknowledges that the "concept of library marketing is not new", he also says that: "Most of the schools of library and information science do not have curriculum courses and units of study in this area of specialisation within librarianship and where they exist they are not part of the core courses."

I can safely conclude that this is strong reasoning for adding more educational training to LIS programs. I am also questioning why these same complaints keep being made, year after year, by libraries all around the world. I definitely don't limit my interest to library marketing in the States. It's an epidemic! More later. Comments welcome.

On a lighter note, we're talking about Kenya. Besides libraries in Kenya, there's lions!