San Jose State University’s Martin Luther King, Jr.

LibraryPatricia ChanNatalie KahnMelinda Vogel

Summer, 2013

King Library houses over 1.5 million volumes, seats more than 3500 people and receives over 2 million visitors each year

Access to hundreds of general and academic research databases are available to library visitors

SJSU's total enrollment was 30,448 in 2012, including over 4,700 graduate students, the largest graduate student enrollment of any campus in the CSU system

King Library (KL) Introduction

San José State University’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library will be a prominent student-centered library that engages diverse learning communities by providing information resources, services and programming through innovative uses of technology

Goals/Initiatives: Learning, teaching, research, collections, services, learning atmosphere, funding, and access

KL Mission, Vision, Goals and Objectives

Located in the heart of Silicon Valley, the SJSU King Library constantly competes to have the newest and best technology

SJSU is surrounded by both great wealth and great poverty, which presents unique challenges

Given the budget reductions of recent years and the economic forecast for 2009-10, the budget for traveling to conferences, etc. has been significantly reduced

Environmental Influences

SJSU students SJSU faculty and staff San Jose, California community users

accessing the public library

KL Stakeholders

Strengths: Strong partnership between King Library and San Jose Public Library, involvement in the community, knowledgeable lib staff, and comprehensive collection

Weaknesses: Dated online catalog Opportunities: Comparison with other Bay

Area libraries, staying tech savvy, partnerships, funding

Threats: Competition with community libs, decreased funding, increased costs

KL Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats

From the 2009 KL Self-Study: “San José State University is a diverse university, with students and teaching faculty from virtually all ethnicities. The student population is made up of Hispanic, Asian, Caucasian, as well as a wealth of other ethnic students, with no majority group”

Demographic information taken from census records and internal records (circulation stats) and research

KL Customer Market Research

Objective and Inferred market segmentation: demographic data, circulation data, and surveys

Prioritizes student segment of market population: students pay tuition in part for library services, make up the largest segment of users

Undifferentiated marketing: In order to best serve the majority of their users, which are students

KL Identifying and Selecting Markets

Three main product lines include: measures to bridge the digital divide, a wide collection of electronic resources, and a physical place for patrons to satisfy their information needs.

Marketing of the library is targeted towards the diverse population which the library serves, including SJSU students and San Jose residents.

The unique collaboration between SJSU and SJPL lends itself many channels of marketing and promotion in order to reach as many individuals as possible.

KL Marketing Mix Strategy: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion

The King library does not conduct any formal program level evaluations but, instituting such measures would only provide further insight into serving patrons

By looking at statistics regarding circulation, program participation, and the rate of returning customers, the library can gain concrete information on the benefits and drawbacks to each program and service they provide

By conducting regular surveys and establishing scorecards to evaluate specific services and programs within the King Library, librarians could understand what patrons were thinking, what was working, and what was not

KL Evaluation