website training and review - what works?

[Carrie Phillips]

Greetings, WEB4LIB,

These questions are geared to those of you in academic library settings...

Here's our situation:

Our campus has recently overhauled its website design and architecture, and
I've had to redesign the library portion of the campus site to match
visually.  We're now hearing two-fold rumors about campus that students are
having trouble finding our library home page from the campus home page, and
that once they do find us, they are having trouble knowing where to go to
find what they need (research databases, etc.).

The first part is difficult to fix:  the new site's architecture was set up,
in the mind of the design firm, to appeal to the prospective student, and
the "meat" of the library's section of the campus site *is* hard to find.
We're not able change the architecture, so we need to educate our users.  If
any of you have been in this situation, what educational methods work??  How
do we get the word out?

The second part is easy to fix, since we have complete control of the
library portion of the website architecture (once the patron finds us on the
campus site), but we're not sure how to fix it.  We'd like to form both
student and faculty focus groups to sit down with us and tell us what they
can find on our site and what they can't.  Have any of you tried this?  Is
it a good way to work this kind of a problem out?

We have a small campus of 1100 students and several faculty members who I
think would be interested in working with us on this.  I'm hoping some of
you can tell me what your past experiences have been with this kind of
thing.

Thanks for your time.  Please reply to phillipsc at bluffton.edu.

--
Carrie Phillips
Computer Technician/ILL Assistant/O-PCIRC
Musselman Library
Bluffton College - BLC
280 W. College Ave., Ste. 4
Bluffton, OH  45817
Ph. 419.358.3275
Fx. 419.358.3384
phillipsc at bluffton.edu