By Mary Mallery

The NJLA CUS/ACRL-NJ Marketing and Communications Committee is five years old!  To celebrate, the members of the Committee suggested that I write up a brief history to review how we started and what we are working on today.

When Trevor Dawes was NJLA CUS/ACRL-NJ President in 2010, he noticed that there were a lot of different venues for communication, such as a wiki and a website and a blog, but they were not kept current and they were not coordinated, so he tasked Denise O'Shea, the Chair of the Technology Committee, and myself, the Web Coordinator, to come up with a plan.  We reached out to other members of the CUS Executive Board, and came up with a proposal for a new Marketing and Communications Committee with the mission "to expand the College and University Section (CUS)’s presence and influence, as well as enhance its image and credibility inside and outside the organization."  The proposal was accepted in 2010, and so the Committee began its work.

The Marketing Committee members are representatives of CUS Committees responsible for communication and member outreach:  the Newsletter Committee, the Membership Committee, the Website Coordinator, the Technology Committee; and it is also open to any NJLA and ACRL member who has an interest in serving. 

The Marketing Committee has accomplished a great deal in the past five years.  In 2011, Trevor Dawes with Denise O'Shea created the NJLA CUS/ACRL-NJ Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/ACRLNJ.  In 2012, Paul Martinez, Chair of the Membership Committee, and Mary Mallery, Chair of the Marketing Committee, debuted our Marketing Strategic Plan at the VALE Conference with a poster (see photo) and a LibGuide with Marketing Planning resources at: http://montclair.libguides.com/cusmarketing. In 2013, Denise O'Shea and Mary Mallery worked with James Keehbler, the NJLA Webmaster, to create the College and University Section drupal website, which we have today at: http://cus.njla.org. In 2014, Joan Dalrymple and Sharon Whitfield created the online-only CUS Newsletter using drupal SimpleNews, which enabled featuring videos as well as print features for the first time.

Current work and plans in 2015 for the Marketing Committee include:

*Gary Schmidt of Fairleigh Dickinson University Library, one of the first Marketing Committee members, keeps up a monthly CUS Member Spotlight feature on the CUS Website that focuses on new members at: http://cus.njla.org/node/581 This month's Spotlight is on Rebecca Sloat, NJLA CUS Newsletter Co-Editor, and the Coordinator, Distributed Technical Services and Serials Acquisitions Team Leader at Rutgers University Libraries;

*Katie Maricic Cohen and Siobhan McCarthy conducted the CUS Social Media Survey and presented a poster session at the VALE 2015 Conference; the CUS Social Media Survey Report is posted as a PDF on the CUS Marketing Committee Documents Website to access with this direct link: http://cus.njla.org/node/589

*Siobhan McCarthy is updating the CUS twitter feed at: https://twitter.com/@acrl_nj  and researching the creation of a new ACRL-NJ LinkedIn presence.

Mary Mallery and Paul Martinez presenting the poster "Developing a Strategic Plan for Marketing and Communications" at the 2012 VALE Annual Users' Conference.

Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in joining the very active CUS Marketing Committee to help us grow in the next five years and beyond.

Mary Mallery, Associate Dean for Technical Services at Montclair State University, is chair of the NJLA CUS/ACRL-NJ Marketing and Communications Committee.  She can be reached at mallerym@mail.montclair.edu