Knowledge Leadership Associates » leverage intellectual assets

Marketing our services

Peter G. Underwood — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 06:41:15 +0000

Ned Potter, in his guise as “The Wikiman”, has produced excellent guidance on the seemingly-simple task of marketing our library and information services. Simple, yes, but all too easy to get wrong. His blog entry of 25 August 2011, Three simple marketing rules all libraries should live by… can be summarised as:

Market the service, not the content: tell the potential user what your service can do, not what it contains.
No-one cares about the “how”! Market in terms of the benefits of using the service, not how it works.
Market what THEY value, but continue to do what WE value: know what it is that users want or need to do and orient marketing to that.

If you are designing a marketing campaign for your service, his blog entry is required reading — and don’t miss the second part of the entry!

Marketing our services is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Copyright and fair use

Peter G. Underwood — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 07:24:55 +0000

The “Fair Use” convention allows the use of small portions of copyrighted materials, without permission, in certain circumstances. It is this agreement that enables one to make a copy of a journal article, for example, for research and private study, to quote from a work that one is reviewing or include quotations in lecture materials. The convention is a privilege — it is not a right — and really constitutes an agreement that the copyright holder will ignore use of material (and, thus, breach of copyright) provided it is within the guidelines.

There is much confusion about how the convention of Fair Use is applied. An article in the 2 August 2011 issue of Inside Higher Ed seeks to explain what can and what cannot be done under the convention. Patrica Aufderheide, in “Myths about Fair Use“, provides a clear explanation and reasoning for the provisions of the convention; although she writes from the perspective of an academic in the United States of America, the guidance she offers is equally applicable in South Africa, wherein the legal system also accepts the Fair Use convention.

Are you working too hard?

Peter G. Underwood — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 16:09:49 +0000

Independent Online’s Business Report for 20 October 2010 reports the results of the 2010 LexisNexis International Workplace Productivity Survey conducted in the United States, United Kingdom, China, Australia and South Africa. It has important implications for Knowledge Management. According to the results of the survey, South African professional workers spent, on average, 9.5 hours a day of the working week at their workplace, longer than any other country group included in the study. In addition, “the survey found that the amount of information workers have to manage for their jobs continues to increase at an alarming rate, with much of it irrelevant to employees getting their jobs done”. Not surprisingly, 82% of the South African respondents wished to be able to spend more time in using the information rather than organizing it; 88% indicated that the inability to find relevant information was a major time-waster and that this was having a deleterious effect on their productivity. The survey concluded that “Workers believe they could be more productive at work if the tools they had access to were designed to work the way that they worked.”

Are you working too hard? is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates