By Hope Leman

As someone who works in a medical library and as someone fascinated by search engines and who wishes well to worthwhile innovation in search, I have a few suggestions for how search engines and Web 2.0 entrepreneurs generally can spread the word about their tools to librarians. Doing so is good business—librarians tend to spend hours searching. They deal with the public and key players in corporate settings and they read blogs by other librarians and pass along news of what they find on such blogs via email or list servers.

This is not an audience that you should ignore.

First of all, what do librarians read? Well, I learned about this very blog by reading a profile of Charles Knight in Information Today and I have followed this blog ever since and read about all of you here.

In addition to the flagship publication Information Today, librarians read many of the other Information Today magazines such as: Computers in Libraries, Searcher, Online and EContent. I suggest reading those and perhaps emailing the authors of articles therein if they look like the kind of people who might be interested in your tool. Librarians tend to be very helpful and eager to assist.

For instance, I have had some mutually productive interactions with various search engine developers I have read about here. They seem to have benefited from my (free!) input and it makes sense to have expert eyes look at your stuff and critique it. I am no expert, but many librarians are very sophisticated, astute analysts of search technologies. After all, many of the leading lights in the search world (e.g., Gary Price, Tara Calishain, Greg Notess, and Mary Ellen Bates) are either former librarians or very much listened to by librarians who attend gatherings such as Internet Librarian and Computers in Libraries. Consider attending those conferences, either as individuals just to get a feel for them or as a sponsor of a booth. You would stand out given that we librarians are quite used to seeing the old standbys such as EBSCO, H.W. Wilson and Gale. Web 2.0 is surprisingly underrepresented at tech-oriented gatherings in the vendor arena.

Consider asking to be a speaker at such conferences. It is hard to get on the list, so you might try some of smaller regional conferences as an exhibitor first. This one is well attended and attracts some very web savvy people from across the library world:

Online Northwest

I am attending this one: Seems like a pretty easy way to reach an audience who could recommend your tool to large numbers of people.

Consider writing to noted librarian bloggers. David Rothman for instance, is a respected, widely read blogger on tech librarianship issues (mostly on medical search but he writes on other tools as well). I know that when he wrote about the tool I work on I got a huge numbers of hits—and was proud to see that many of my librarian colleagues saw David’s post about it too. And a professor in my master’s program at the University of Pittsburgh saw that post and sent out an email about it to all my classmates.

Speaking of library school students, cultivate them. Look into sponsoring a booth at recruiting fairs or information school events. The coming generation of library school students is into new web services and would appreciate your interest. Think about setting up a scholarship or competition of some kind for library school students.

And on the topic of competitions: many public libraries already sponsor gaming nights. Why not see if a local public library or high school would be interested in a Search Night or College Bowl type of competition?

Here is a blog that might have some good ideas for innovative ways to interact with public libraries:

The search industry as a whole is missing the chance to get the same sort of mileage that Westinghouse got over the years with its science competition and that the National Geographic gets with its geography bee. It would help the search industry as a whole if some such competition were to gain national attention. Sample questions:

• How many search engines can you find in 15 minutes?

• Which has more states, Mexico or India?

• In what country is the birthplace of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk found?

• How many health-related search engines can you find in five minutes?

• Which had the highest profits in 2007, Google or Microsoft?

• How many appendectomies are performed annually in the US?

These are just a few thoughts. Maybe some are goofy, but they aren’t beyond the budgets of most startups.