Student use of library web services - was: Library web siteorganization

[Andrew K. Pace]

Tony,
I don't think this is the case, in general.  My argument is that if
users are ignoring the libraries resources it's partly because we have
done a crummy job of organizing them.  When we added our local
classificatin to electronic resources
(http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/eresources), usage increased 123% over the
previous year, and 85% over the previous six months.  On the other hand,
we discovered that hardly anyone was using the subject list of
electronic journals, and in some cases, they did not understand that
many of those journals were indexed in the databases that they were
passing up to browse those journals one by one.  We are looking now to
redesign this interface based on better usage.  The failure here is not
in the resources that we are offering, it's in the instruction and
design of the interfaces.  If the catalog has died as a useful tool,
then libraries killed it with benign neglect...I don't want the same
thing to happen to our web sites.
-Andrew

Tony Barry wrote:

> At 10:42 AM -0800 1/11/2000, Andrew K. Pace wrote:
> >A lot of us have created browsable subjects for electronic
> >resources, now we are talking about creating them for our web
> >pages...have we forgotten the catalog?  Isn't there a chance here
> >for a technical apologia for LCSH?  The online catalog made our
> >holdings
> >infinitely more searchable, it made
>
> I'm picking up anecdotal comment from teaching academics (from two
> universities) that, much to their chagrin, their students are
> ignoring ALL library services and relying on the big internet search
> engines for research.
>
> Has anybody see anything written on this or have comments?
>
> I've also got general comments the library subject gateways to the
> web are being ignored for the same reason.
>
> Tony
> --
> ---
> phone  +61 2 6241 7659
> mailto:me at Tony-Barry.emu.id.au
> http://purl.oclc.org/NET/Tony.Barry
>
> On Aboriginal Policy
> "And if governments will not act, then this is a matter on which
> people must act to secure a government that will.The dignity and
> self esteem of Australia at some point will demand it."
>
> Malcolm Fraser 24 Aug 2000

--
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Andrew K. Pace
Assistant Head, Systems ~ NCSU Libraries
North Carolina State University ~ Raleigh, NC
andrew_pace at ncsu.edu ~ 919-515-3087
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