Location information on library/institution webpages

[Steve Clancy]

Greetings.

While putting together a list of library homepages (for the Medical
Library Association's '96 Annual Meeting homepage at
"http://www.kumc.edu/MLA/MLA96/"), I noticed something rather interesting.

Many of the library homepages I visited, and also those of the affiliated
institutions, did not clearly identify the location of the library, i.e.
City and State.

In some cases, the name of the institution gives it away, as in
"University of California, San Francisco."  However, many pages were
titled something like "The Sam Jones Medical Library, Plains University"
(the names have been changed to protect the guilty ;-). Someone out of the
area, or out of the U.S.A. might not have a clue as to where "Plains
University" is.  I found that it often took considerable digging through
the web site to discover where the institution or library was located.

I've noticed that this seems to be a chronic problem on the WWW in
general, but we in the library world should be more conscientious about
providing complete and accurate information.

Some might argue that physical location is irrelevant in the "virtual
world," but I don't think we're quite there yet.

Check out your own library's and/or institution's homepage and see if you
can easily tell where it's located (assuming you didn't already know.)

Any discussion? Observations?

-- Steve Clancy