Incorporating Digital Collection Into Your Community Outreach

Demand for digital content is on the rise, so are you fully leveraging your digital collection in your marketing and outreach efforts?

Aside from just the standard promotion of your digital collection, this course will teach you how the collection can be used to support promotional and partnership opportunities and, reinforce your library’s values and mission. In addition, you will learn how to and effectively drive usage in both your digital and physical spaces.

Furthermore, by integrating promotions around both digital and physical collections, you can create a more engaging and cohesive approach to your community outreach, increasing overall awareness of your library.

Learning outcomes:

• Reimagine ways to better use your digital collection as a promotional vehicle
• Conduct a long-term digital strategy to ensure your collection is aligned with library’s marketing and outreach objectives
• Identify and leverage the benefits of your digital collection
• Execute simple strategies and tactics that cross-promote digital and physical offerings

Course Audience: This informative course is perfect for libraries of all sizes and is beneficial whether your focus is on adult or youth services, collection development, or marketing.

Required Materials: All required readings and resources will be provided through Canvas.

This course is not tied to any specific digital platform, vendor, or content provider. It is designed to help library professionals rethink outreach and engagement in a digital‑first age, where patrons increasingly discover and use library resources online.

The strategies shared are platform‑agnostic and adaptable. Whether your library provides streaming video, eBooks, audiobooks, or databases, the focus is on how digital collections are positioned, messaged, and integrated into everyday library spaces and services.

A central theme of the course is that increasing the visibility of digital collections within the physical library strengthens engagement. Digital and physical experiences work best when they reinforce one another.