The Library Marketing Toolkit

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Morguefile.com : for me, Morguefile is the king of stock photo sites. Free, very high quality images, lots to choose from, and they're even licensed for commercial use.

Compfight is a really useful Flickr search tool, which brings back good quality results and is sortable by Attribution / Commercial Licences.

Blue Mountains is a another Flickr search tool that only looks for Creative Commons images - there's some nice stuff on there, it seems to get rid of a lot of the dross. Toolkit tip: try using 'bw' as part of your search to bring back stylish black & white images.

iStockphoto is probably the industry standard photo site, but you have to pay (it can be worth it), StockXChange is another free site along the lines of Morguefile, although you'll need to check each picture to see if they can be allowed for commercial use.

Two more useful tools - Flickr Words allows you to write words and phrases using images of each letter. It looks better than I'm making it sound; try it out, it's a really nice effect. And this nifty piece of software allows you to look up any Flickr photo and see exactly what the usage rights are.

Issuu is an platform for publishing documents - it turns PDFs into attractive online publications with a nice page-turning device, which you can then embed wherever you want. It saves having to make PDFs available for download (from a marketing point of view, the user being able to engage with content instantly - and knowing that they're going to get - is a must) and it can turn printed brochures and magazines into online editions with almost no effort. (See how the Toolkit uses Issuu with its LibMarketing magazine, here .)

It's worth considering putting dynamic content above the fold of your library website (which is to say, the part the user can see without having to scroll down). So rather than just text and images, you can put the same information in slides embedded via Authorstream (larger file size limit) or Slideshare (potentially reaches a much greater audience), or altneratively in something like Prezi or Vuvox .

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Who writes this blog? Ned Potter York Ned Potter is an academic librarian at the University of York, and the author of The Library Marketing Toolkit, published by Facet Publishing in 2012. His website, covering other library issues, can be found at thewikiman.org . View my complete profile

Other useful sites about marketing libraries 658.8 - Marketing tips for Public Libraries Alison Circle's The Bubble Room on Library Journal The M Word - Marketing Libraries, from Nancy Dowd Marketing Matters for Librarians, from Alison Wallbutton Marketing Success: Best Practice Wiki

658.8 - Marketing tips for Public Libraries

Alison Circle's The Bubble Room on Library Journal

The M Word - Marketing Libraries, from Nancy Dowd

Marketing Matters for Librarians, from Alison Wallbutton

Marketing Success: Best Practice Wiki