Amplify Your Impact: An Interview with Mark Aaron Polger, Editor of Marketing Libraries Journal

Abstract

Mark Aaron Polger is the First Year Outreach Librarian at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York (CUNY), where his responsibilities include promoting library services and resources as well as providing instruction to first year students. Polger is also an Information Literacy Instructor at ASA College. His research interests include library marketing, outreach, and user experience design. He is active in LLAMA as the chair of the PR XChange Committee as well as the co-chair of the Annual PR XChange Awards Competition. Regionally, he is an active executive board member of ACRL/NY (Association of College and Research Libraries, Greater Metropolitan New York Area), where he serves on the planning committee of the annual symposium and co-chairs the User Experience Discussion Group. Locally, he co-chairs meetings in New York City for ACRL National’s Library Marketing and Outreach Interest Group. He is also a member of the planning committee of the annual Library Marketing and Communications Conference (LMCC). He is co-chair of the LACUNY (Library Association of the CUNY) Library Marketing and Outreach Roundtable Discussion Group.

Currently, Polger is the founder and editor-in-chief of the new open-access, peer-reviewed Marketing Libraries Journal, which was launched in fall 2017.

Originally from Montreal, Canada, Polger holds a BA in Sociology from Concordia University (1999), an MLIS from the University of Western Ontario (2000), an MA in Sociology from University of Waterloo (2004), and a BEd in Adult Education from Brock University (2009). He is currently a third-year PhD student in the Curriculum, Instruction, and the Science of Learning Program at SUNY University at Buffalo. He moved to New York City in 2008.

The first issue of Marketing Libraries Journal was published in fall 2017. We wanted to ask Mark about his inspiration to create this new publication.—Editors