The marketing project of the Presidential Library received international recognition at the IFLA competition

Following the results of the International Competition of Library Marketing Projects held by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) in 2017, a project of the Presidential Library named “Look / Read / Listen” was included into the top ten best projects in the world.

The Presidential Library made a very interesting proposal to its users: they were given a chance to participate directly in formation of the library's fund, namely, to become the creators of its multimedia content.

The “Look / Read / Listen” project included the already existing “Foreign View” Annual International Photo Competition of the Presidential Library. It has been held since 2010, and the interest to it is continuously growing: a competition has begun with 100 participants from 7 countries, and the next year there were already 400 participants from 28 countries. For the 2016 contest, more than 4,700 entries were sent from 28 countries. The best of them are traditionally published in the photo album and add to the Presidential Library stock. The main practical task of the “Look / Read / Listen” project is a campaign focused on perpetuating the memory of participants in the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945), timed to the 70th anniversary of the Great Victory over fascism. During its implementation in the territories of the former USSR, more than 10,000 photographs were collected. On the basis of this array, along with the St. Petersburg University, the “Victory is one for all” film was created, various exhibitions were prepared, and some photos were added to the library fund, continuing the “Memory of the Great Victory” field-oriented collection.

The years 2015 and 2016 in Russia were dedicated to literature and cinema, and the Presidential Library focused on these two areas in its multimedia segment.

Created content is running on the library website and plasma panels across the library exposition facilities, in social networks, educational resources, and in public places: the airports, the trains, film centers and production studios, parks and recreation areas, the book fears. By virtue of this potential library users get familiar with the Presidential Library with its unique discipline-specific fund of sources on the history and the legal or judicial system of the Russian Federation and the Russian language as a state language, numbering today more than 550 thousand entries. This content is built of digital copies of printed editions, archival evidences and official documents, museum pieces, as well as multimedia.

The statistics of browsing history shows a growing interest of the audience to the multimedia content. There is an obvious worldwide tendency among Internet users - they are largely engaged with photography and video production.

Exhibitions based on the submitted content for the last 2 years were held at the airports Pulkovo (St. Petersburg) and Vnukovo (Moscow), “On Krasnaya Presnya” Park (Moscow), the “LenDock” Film Production Studios (St. Petersburg). In 2016, based on the content sent by the participants of the “Look / Read / Listen” project movie entitled “Victory is one for all” was screened in high-speed train named “Sapsan” (connecting Moscow and St. Petersburg). In the airports of the following 12 cities of the Russian Federation - Moscow, St. Petersburg, Simferopol, Khabarovsk, Sochi, Krasnodar, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Novosibirsk, Chelyabinsk, Surgut, Vladivostok - the passengers have seen multimedia content created within the “Look / Read / Listen” project. Printed products with information about the project were distributed in visitor and travel centers, in the book and photography retail trade systems. Once a month, there were announcements of collections within “Look / Read / Listen” the project in the most popular St. Petersburg’s TV guide.

As a result, the marketing policy of the Presidential Library is intensively developing various forms of disclosure and popularization of the library fund, attracting thousands of users.

While have been evaluating bids for the best project of library marketing 2017, announced by IFLA, the founders of the contest were taking into account such criteria as a strategic approach to marketing, including those applied by the library at the research and planning stages of the submitted project; creativity and innovativeness, which allows to solve the marketing tasks of the library in an original way; and also the effectiveness, confirmed by the evaluation of the results achieved during the project implementation.