Library marketing in the digital age: A systematic literature review of evolving approaches, paradigms, and practices

This paper presents a systematic literature review of marketing in library and information services, conducted in accordance with the PRISMA 2020 guidelines. A structured search across Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar yielded 1247 records, from which 78 sources were included in the final synthesis: 66 contemporary LIS sources published between 2004 and 2025 and 12 foundational pre-2004 theoretical sources identified through backward citation tracking. The review synthesizes the literature along four analytical dimensions: the theoretical evolution of marketing and its adaptation to the library context; national and regional patterns of library marketing development; the contemporary toolkit of marketing technologies; and emerging trends, research gaps, and future directions. Through thematic coding and comparative clustering of the included sources by regional context, institutional setting, dominant understanding of marketing, practical tools, and criteria of effectiveness, five analytical paradigms of library marketing are identified: managerial, socially inclusive, institutional, technological, and adaptive. The review shows that these paradigms should not be understood as fixed or mutually exclusive models, but as dominant orientations that increasingly converge around governance integration, channel digitalization, user co-creation, impact measurement, and ethical communication. Persistent research gaps are identified in longitudinal studies, user-perspective research, quality assessment of marketing interventions, and the understanding of marketing adoption in transitional library systems. The study contributes to the field by offering a transparent synthesis of the English- and Russian-language literature on library marketing and by proposing a paradigm-based analytical lens for future comparative research.