This page contains a bunch of really key links, arranged by what
you might be looking to do. If you know of essential resources that
should be on the this page, please let me know via a comment and I'll
add them as we go along.
I want to find high quality images for use in my marketing
- 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.
I want to publish marketing materials online
- 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.
I want to see library marketing videos done well
The famous 'New Spice' marketing video for the library at Brigham Young University is obviously the gold standard for this sort of thing (3 million views and counting, because it's awesome) - but it's a bit of a one-off, costing more time and money than 99% of libraries have to spend.For something a little more achievable to which to aspire, I really like Arizona State's One Minute series - here's one example, but have a look at the others they've got up on Youtube; all of them are done well. They don't just cover the features in that one minute - they talk about the benefits too.
