Steven J. Bell (2009)
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Steven J. Bell (2009, February 17). The Library Web Site of the Future. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved February 28 2009 from http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/02/17/bell
Steven J. Bell is associate university librarian at Temple University. He blogs at The Kept-Up Academic Libriarian.
Contents |
[edit] Excerpts
Academic librarians want their Web sites to attract faculty and students: research databases, costly electronic journals and digital books and treasures.
- Faculty need to easily find scholarly content that supports their research.
- Students should discover the resources that strengthen their research and result in high quality assignments.
However...
[edit] Ithaka report (2008)
In August 2008 the Ithaka Group released a report, “Studies of Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation of Higher Education”, on the relationship between faculty members and their libraries’ electronic resources.
- Faculty perceived the library’s collective electronic resources, particularly in business, science and technology, as far more critical to scholarship than print collections are.
- But there is a significant disconnect when it comes to faculty use of the library’s website as a gateway, or portal, to access that wealth of electronic content.
- Faculty no longer perceived the library as an important portal to scholarly information.
- Faculty increasingly access what they need elsewhere or simply find alternate routes around the library Web site to get to their desired library e-resources.
[edit] Simon Inger Consulting (2008)
A report from Simon Inger Consulting (September 2008) “How Readers Navigate to Scholarly Content” presented data about researchers’ preferred starting points.
- Specific specialist databases, which suggests scholars simply bookmark the library databases they use most often, and
- General Web search engines.
- Library Web sites are even less frequently used than publishers’ Web sites, non-library gateways to journals, and even e-mail-based journal alerts.
[edit] Bruce Heterick (2008)
An articled titled “Measuring the ‘Google Effect’ at JSTOR” by Bruce Heterick appeared in the June 2008 issue of Against the Grain, and it documented the increased access of JSTOR content via Google Scholar.
- JSTOR usage has increased dramatically since its inception in 1997.
- But more recently a new growth wave is propelled by referrals from non-traditional sites.
- Heterick writes “another order of magnitude change in scale is introduced when we begin to look at the number of links coming to JSTOR directly from Google and Google Scholar.”
- The number of links to JSTOR articles from Google-referring URLs increased by 159 percent from 2006 to 2007.
[edit] LibQual
LibQual is a satisfaction survey administered by many academic libraries.
- If there’s one thing the respondents dislike more than completing the LibQual survey, it’s the library’s Web site.
[edit] Transforming Library's web portals
Libraries have grown too dependent on their Web sites as gateways to electronic scholarly content, and have invested too much time trying to fix what is broken.
This needs to change:
- improve the usability
- tabbed interfaces,
- simple search boxes and
- more personalization
- connect a user to content, be it
- an article database,
- e-book or
- e-journal article
Faculty and students
- tend to have their one or two favorites, for example, JSTOR for many faculty and Academic Search Premier for students.
- can access from dozens to hundreds of databases with little or no idea what they are or how to find them.
- rarely use the library’s Web site to connect to content that satisfies their scholarly needs
- invent their own backdoor routes to the content, but
- miss related or new electronic resources made available by the library
- forged their own paths to circumvent the library back in the print only days,
but now the possibilities for and associated risks of missing important resources are astronomically greater.
Advocating a much needed transformation of the library portal leads to two questions.
- First, how can libraries more effectively create awareness about their content so users can discover it?
- Second, what should replace the library portal?
The answers are intertwined, but the changes needed depend on faculty recognizing that it is a change they must help to facilitate.
[edit] Single search box vs Library services
More libraries are moving to a single search box powered by a federated search engine that retrieves information from multiple resources at once. In order to emulate search engines those boxes are relegated to some familiar space at the top of the page.
Rather than attempting to mimic search engines academic librarians should aim to differentiate their Web sites. They should devote the most eye-catching space to
- information that promotes the people who work at the library,
- the services they provide and
- the community activities that anchor the library’s place as the social, cultural and intellectual center of campus.
That shifts the focus from content to service and from information to people.
[edit] Human side of Library
Academic libraries must promote their human side
- emphasize the value of and invite stronger relationships with faculty and students
- going beyond offering a commodity that, by and large, the user community can well access without the Web site
- must leverage what academic librarians can do to help faculty and students improve their productivity and achieve success.
But if libraries radically change the nature of their homepage, where will all the links to content go?
How will the library make those expensive databases accessible to faculty and students?
Academic libraries are already moving in new directions that may provide the answers, and it suggests the library portal no longer needs to compete to be the one-stop portal where faculty and their students begin their research.
These pioneering libraries distribute the content across the institution’s network and beyond. They are putting the links where faculty and students can find them easily. It changes the library website paradigm from “you must visit our portal” to “we’ll be where you are.”
[edit] Customized content packages
Academic librarians (at the Temple University Libraries) are making it easier than ever for faculty to integrate an array of research tools into course management software or even a faculty member’s personal website.
- Course sites are ready made for links to library content.
- Customized content packages that contain just the right databases that students need for their assignments.
- Custom Google search boxes and non-library links that may be of use to instructors and their students.
- Links to specific articles, those can be added as well.
- The content package is sent to faculty as an e-mail attachment.
- Faculty then simply upload it to their course site.
- The content installs itself as a unique courseware page and even adds a library link to the course menu.
- It eliminates any faculty excuses for not integrating the library into their course.
[edit] LibGuides
Libraries are also offering new technologies that blow the doors off those traditional subject guides to which faculty and students long ago stopped paying attention.
LibGuides is an example of an increasingly popular guide creator that allows librarians to create a highly customized research guide for any single course or assignment.
Research conducted by academic librarians made it clear that students preferred customized course and assignment guides to broad subject guides.
Why?
- It puts the links they need to complete research assignments right where they need them.
- Scavenger hunts through library portals to locate needed databases or e-journals can become a practice of the past.
While LibGuides can exist outside of courses, faculty can certainly
- make it easier for students to discover them by adding links to the guides.
- take it a step further and allow a librarian to integrate the guide into their course.
[edit] Collaboration between faculty and librarians
The faculty
- is the catalyst in this transformation of the library portal concept.
- open the door to greater collaboration with academic librarians.
Librarians can force their presence into institutional courseware, primarily *by getting the system administrators to add links to the library here and there in the software,
- work with a faculty member to integrate the library’s electronic resources into the course site or class Web site itself.
Faculty members can also facilitate this process by
- becoming more familiar with the library’s electronic resources in their disciplines.
- Working with academic librarians faculty can achieve both goals:
- creating greater e-resource awareness and
- shifting discovery paths from the mysterious bowels of the library portal to the more transparent course site.
Faculty need to increase their personal awareness of library e-resource content and endeavor to raise the awareness level among their students.
OCLC's research (2006)
OCLC’s research, compiled in a 2006 report titled “College Students’ Perceptions of Library and Information Resources,” confirms that students are heavily influenced by faculty recommendations for electronic information resources.
[edit] Conclusion
Working collaboratively with their campus librarians faculty could become a more reliable conduit to reaching and enlightening students about the library’s wealth of e-resources.
In the print era the research library building’s design was intentional in seeking to
- invite in the scholar and then
- draw them into the stacks and those places where
- discovery and intellectual awareness could take hold and grow.
In the early stages of research library Web site design, perhaps the same approach made sense, but it no longer works if it ever did.
With faculty advocating e-resource awareness and distributing links to the library’s e-resources throughout the academic network, a dedicated portal to those same resources makes less sense.
Add to that a body of evidence that clearly points to the growing irrelevance of the “be all things to all campus constituents” library homepage and Web site.
Put simply, the library portal as we know it today is unsustainable.
It, along with a host of other indicators such as
- declines in reference questions and
- shifts from print to e-resources,
signals that for academic libraries a “let’s just keep doing business as usual” mentality is a sure path to obsolescence.
If academic librarians fail to grasp the urgency of needed changes to their portals it is quite possible we will read in a future article something along the lines of
- “Academic librarians thought they were in the information gateway business, but they were really in the learning and scholarly productivity business. They just didn’t recognize it.”
