Just recently I read a quote from Don Joyce (of Negativland) on Wired and it seemed suitable to libraries and marketing. Joyce says:

“Selectivity becomes of prime importance, whether it’s looking for content or trying to find what you’re looking for in a thousand pages of search results. As Duchamp and Warhol predicted before they ever saw a computer, there is an art and a message in the act of selection itself.”

Working in libraries over the years, I have noticed one thing come up over and over again: librarians do not understand the fine art of selection. Yes, they are well meaning. When an undergraduate comes to a class or to the reference desk librarians always try to tell the student everything.

Instead we need to retrain ourselves to only impart exactly the information that is needed.

In marketing this means that we have to choose our images with great care. This is one of the reasons that Jonathan and I want to rid the world of clip art.

Both Warhol and Duchamp were excellent at picking out something in everyday life and calling it art. Warhol’s most famous piece of art is the Campbell’s Soup Can and Duchamp’s is the Urinal—and before you can say “I can do better than that”–the truth is you didn’t!—And that is the thing about art and selection and I think that we should all embrace this idea: every image we use to promote our services and activities has weight, so choice carefully!

Every person should consider themselves an artist when choosing, because in our overly media saturated world the choice itself becomes a kind of art.

Mary and I are testing out a new blog design. If you are reading this in a feed reader, come check out the new design and the new features.

Poke around and let us know what you think.

In Fearless Future’s attempt to remove the scourge that is clipart from the face of the earth, here is a list of stock photography sites and other alternatives:

Cheap sites:

• http://www.istockphoto.com/
  Great quality, most images are $1 - $5 but can go up as high as $40 for huge images.
• http://www.bigstockphoto.com/
  Images range from $1.40 -$2.50 each for all of them.

Expensive sites:

• http://www.veer.com/
  Impeccable quality, but pricey. Images range from $130 - $420 each or discs of multiple images in a set for $500.
• http://www.corbis.com/
  If you can’t find it on Veer you can find it on Corbis, prices are practically identical.
• http://www.photos.com/en/
  One of many stock photo subscription sites (basically you pay them a fee and they provide you with unlimited access to their collection). The subscriptions range from 1 month ($140) to a year ($600), this would be a great option if you use enough images to make it worth it.

Alternate options:

This is where is gets fun. These are free and/or alternate options to typical stock photos.

• http://creativecommons.org/
  Creative Commons is an alternative to copyright. On their site, they have a searchable repository of different types of digital works that are licensed under that would allow you to use them almost always for free (if you don’t use them on commercial projects and you say who created them)
• http://www.zoo-m.com/flickr-storm/
  With the advanced search on this site you can search the popular photo community flickr for images that are published under Creative Commons. If you find a picture/artist you like, send them an e-mail and see if you can use their work for your project.
• http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html
  Library of Congress’ Prints & Photographs Online Catalog. LOC has digitized a ton of their prints and offered them up online for the taking - the majority of them are out of copyright.
• http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html
  The American Memory Project is just like the Prints & Photographs but focuses on the “American Experience.”

Feel free to add to the list at the AcademicPR Forum under “Marketing and PR”

Collage Images is a flickr group that is a great collection of vintage copyright-free artwork that you can grab and use as you wish.

I really hope that we can see more of this in the future. Take a few minutes and explore the collection, they have some really great and obscure images. Believe me, these images are a much better option than using clip art, and a lot cheaper than hiring a designer.

—-
P.S.
You do have to register with the group before you can view the images.

Below you see a representative sample of the marketing materials brought by participants in the ALA (American Library Association) pre-conference about marketing. These are the materials that libraries around North America are developing. Over the next month I will be uploading other examples from the same pre-conference.

Click the thumbnails to see the bigger pictures.

Please respond with your reactions to the above designs, I would love to hear what you think about what other libraries are doing, and let us know what you are doing.

Feel free to upload your own images using the comment tools.