You've Licensed It. Now What?

While libraries face challenges in building usage of a new medium like streaming video, strategic, active marketing by libraries, with support from vendors, can overcome these challenges. Time-tested marketing strategies, as well as leveraging new promotional tools can help the library attain the usage that justifies the investment in new media. If you license, with a little help, they will come. Unfortunately, the "build it and they will come" phenomenon does not apply to library media collections. The active marketing of new library resources is one of the necessary chores to ensure that patrons know about and use the resources. This is especially true about new media formats, and in particular the relatively new resource of streaming media. This paper will look at the challenges libraries face in promoting the use of streaming media collections, and strategies employed by academic libraries to meet that challenge.