Abstract
Modern librarianship made marketing an important aspect of the profession, revealing the competencies displayed in the
superfluity of knowledge services. The study revealed users’ perception of needs to market the library. These include to enlighten
users’ on the contemporary relevance of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) & manuals (97.9%), improvement of
interpersonal relations (95.8%), for users’ to have a fearless knowledge in usage and satisfaction of their puzzles (93.9%) and
for a conducive environment (91.4%), and to ascertain users’ information needs in this era (90.7%). Study also revealed that
users’ perceived marketable services in the following order: online information services (97.2%), reference services (95.6%), user
education (93.5%), selective dissemination of information (88.8%), information literacy programme (87.9%), current awareness
services (86.2%), referrals (86%), library publication (82.5%), translation (82.03%), and interlibrary loan (67.4%). For the last
objective, study revealed users’ perception of librarians’ competencies for marketing libraries in their preferred order – ability to
create library web pages for users’ information (99.1%), information technology skills (98.4%), flexibility to make changes (96.7%),
ability to calm offended users’ (96.5%), ability to answer users’ queries (96.3%), professional charisma (93.5%), professional
initiative (90.7%), and ability to use ICT gadgets (90.4%). The researchers therefore recommends that management should help
librarians to take part in training that would nurture the strengthening of these competencies.
Keywords: Information, Marketing Academic Libraries, Users’ Perception, Librarians’ Competencies, Needs, Library Management
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