FW: [WEB4LIB] Library web site organization

[Gimon, Charles A]

The major issue that I'm trying to overcome here is that we have three major
blocks of users for our web pages:

--Library staff
--users at our public workstations
--general public users coming from outside the Library

but we force all three groups to use the same website, even though they have
different needs and expectations.

Most librarians here still haven't absorbed the idea that the general public
use our website too--they view our web pages as a tool for them to use on
the job, nothing more.  The coming solution for this is going to be an
Intranet that will be designed around the needs of librarians on the job, so
that our public pages can concentrate on the needs of the public. Librarians
are happy, public's happy, hopefully it's a win-win situation.

--Charles Gimon
  Minneapolis Public Library


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tim Smith [mailto:tsmith1 at ohiou.edu] 
> Sent: Wednesday, November 01, 2000 7:31 AM
> To: Multiple recipients of list
> Subject: [WEB4LIB] Library web site organization
> 
> 
> I don't know if this is a silly idea or not, but it's 
> something I've been
> thinking about and mulling over with some of my colleagues 
> for awhile now,
> and I'd like to hear other folks' reactions. From looking at 
> the various web
> pages of colleges and universities, it seems that most of 
> us--my library
> included--use a pretty traditional "libraryish" model to 
> organize our home
> pages: online catalog(s), databases, reference sources, 
> electronic journals,
> information about our libraries, pathfinders/subject guides, etc.
> 
> This is an arrangement that we are very comfortable with, but 
> which is often
> baffling to our users. They are likely to be more familiar 
> with a mostly
> subject-based organization such as Yahoo's, for example. And 
> most of us are
> doubtless pretty comfortable browsing in an directory like 
> Yahoo or the
> Librarians' Index to the Internet, burrowing down to what we 
> want to find,
> even if it doesn't follow normal library-like organization.
> 
> My question--you surely saw it coming--then is whether it 
> would work to
> arrange a library's web site like Yahoo or LII. Rather than splitting
> databases, reference sites, etc. into separate categories on 
> the home page,
> use a top-level subject hierarchy, with functional or format 
> categories
> underneath. I doubt that most of our users think in terms of 
> format first.
> It's pretty abstract, and is not entirely satisfactory 
> anyway: where do you
> categorize a multi-format database?
> 
> Are there any library web sites already doing this? If so, 
> which ones? If
> not, why not? What are the advantages and disadvantages of 
> this type of
> arrangement as opposed to what we're doing now? I seem to 
> recall a bit of
> Yahoo-bashing on this list a little while back, but I'd 
> really like to see
> some further discussion on this subject.
> 
> Tim Smith
> 
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>     Tim Smith                    Phone: (740) 593-2634
>     Reference Dept.              E-Mail: tsmith1 at ohiou.edu
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> 
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