On the 20th April 2010 the History of Advertising Trust invited us on a tour of their library.
My colleague initially discovered the Trust through their latest project “Ghost Signs“. She had taken a picture of an advertisement sign painted on a wall, which she posted to her FLICKR account. They found her picture and asked if they could include in their collection. This chance encounter is an excellent example of the mutualisation of information production, central to the changing direction of the newspaper industry. As such we were keen to visit their library and see their work in action.
We were given a tour of their collection which includes: jingle recordings, television advertisements, posters, magazine and newspaper advertisements.
We discussed their users. A lot of focus was placed on making their collections more accessable to school groups. The resources were being tailored to the national curriculum. The tailoring of sources to users is a key area which we can learn from. Following this trip we added a series of leadership timelines to our election resources. They were directly used by guardian.co.uk.
They also expressed problems they have with funding their projects, another area where we have suffered as a department. Their determined self promotion – through press releases, repackaging of resources, working with other communities, maintaining close relationships with their clients and finding new ways to add value to their clients’ collections – also provided a source of inspiration.
We should be doing similar work, not only passively taking queries but also suggesting other ways we can help our users, trying to present our resources in the most helpful ways possible (e.g. bullet points rather than paragraphs of info; actually answering questions rather than providing general info on a topic), making sure our intranet remains up to date with the latest issues and by making sure our users think to ask us when they need help by getting ourselves known to them personally (embedding workers, offering to meet them face-to-face when they are working on big projects etc.)
