[Web4lib] Link to Library site on College website

[Richard Wiggins]

One solution that one major midwestern university adopted was to have ZERO
direct links from the main university home page to any constituent sites.
 You can't complain that the Department of Etruscan Literature has a direct
link, and you don't, if neither of you has a link.

Also bear in mind that up to 50% of all visitors to the institutional home
page will go to the Search box and will ignore all that hand-crafted nav.
 Therefore if you ensure that a search for "library" (or "libary") goes to
the right place, you've won half the battle.

And back to the nav topic: demand to see the search logs.  I've looked at
search logs for several major universities, and "library" is a top 10 search
term (regardless of whether there is a link on the home page).

If your Web or IT people aren't doing search analytics, they are not
competent to comment on this issue.

/rich

On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 1:05 PM, Elisabeth Long <elong at uchicago.edu> wrote:

> >
> > Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:03:24 -0600
> > From: nancy at thesmudge.com
> > Subject: [Web4lib] Link to Library site on College website
> > To: web4lib at webjunction.org
> > Message-ID:
> >        <b7f78f1f4fc764d98060b8c724dca089.squirrel at email.powweb.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1
> >
> > The academic institution where I work is redesigning its website.
> > Once again I am making the case for a link to the library site on the
> > College home page.
> >
> >
> We had a similar situation recently but I and our communications director
> successfully argued for the importance of a Library link.  The University
> was implementing a portal which would take care of the internal needs of
> students and faculty so the main Univ web site was being refocused as a
> communications and recruitment tool.
> So we focused on these issues:
>  - the Library is at the heart of the scholarly and pedagogical endeavor.
> Its presence on the home page signals to the outside world the University's
> values in this regard.  (conversely, its absence could be seen as signaling
> a devaluing of research and collections)
>  - we're a major research library so the depth of our collections is an
> important draw for faculty and grad students and it should be easy for
> prospectives to find us and see how we meet their research needs
>  - the Library offers exhibits and special collections that are open to the
> public and as such it is a destination for an external audience, not just
> our internal students and faculty.  i.e. it is one of the cultural
> resources
> on campus.
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