[WEB4LIB] Re: Library Web Page Use

[Karen Harker]

Your answer does not surprise me.  The concern of position of the Library's site w/in a university's site is not uncommon and many of us have faced this at some point over the last few years.

Your attempts to use Website usage stats may work if the campus administration takes such information into their considerations.  However, it sounds like simple usage stats may not affect their decisions.  The campus administration must make a decision on the purpose of the site.

Having a public affairs department taking over the Web site is far too common, nowadays.  The issue is the purpose of the Web site - is it to facilitate education and research by increasing access to information (through libraries, sharing data, developing online courses, etc.), or is it to attract students' tuition and supporters' donations?

The site cannot support both purposes...the former requires unfettered access to the information, whereas the latter requires suppressing information that may affect its goals.

To me, the best solution is two sites, whether an extranet and intranet or two separate extranets.  The public affairs department publishes brochures and pamphlets to advertise the school's accomplishments, but they do not publish academic works.  

Much of this is campus politics and having an administration that is close to the library is always helpful.  One way of breeding this closeness is to listen to the campus administration's needs and desires and deliver solutions, even if it is not solely a library-oriented service. Similarly, make yourselves invaluable to the most influential faculty. For instance, we determined from our faculty that access to electronic journals from their desktops was most important to them, even at the expense of print subscriptions. Therefore, we expanded our collection to over 5K titles, thus making access to our resources via the Web imperative.

I wish you the best of luck in your efforts. It will continue to be a struggle, I'm sure. 



Karen R. Harker, MLS
UT Southwestern Medical Library
5323 Harry Hines Blvd.
Dallas, TX  75390-9049
214-648-1698
http://www.swmed.edu/library/

>>> Craighton Hippenhammer <chhammer at olivet.edu> 12/7/01 2:52:55 AM >>>
Why this information and or study would be so helpful here has to do with the link on the university's homepage to the library's homepage (and a whole lot more).  Let me explain.

Our Computer Center is under the VP of Finance/Administration, and not the Academic Dean. This has all sorts of implications on the development and use (and disuse) of technology among professors, and therefore by implication, everyone else in academics, especially students.  Our "Academic Computing Center" (real name: Media and Technical Support [Doesn't that name just speak volumes?]), is pretty good, but has no clout because of the Academic Dean's obliviousness.  And now a new center of power has arisen on campus: marketing and public relations has gained control over the campus website.  Look at the order of the black buttons in the bar across the top of the new page: http://www.olivet.edu, which will tell you volumes about what is important on our campus.  And you have to go through an "About" page to get to library resources.

Every time the campus website has gone through a redesign, I have had to fight to get a direct link to the library back on the institution's home page.  All three times, I've been successful, but here we go again.  I suppose this issue is just a flash point, really standing for so much more.  But if there is no access, or difficult access, from the institution's main Web base to the library, it only makes our job as librarians and cybrarians that much harder.

I know we're not the only library that has this problem.  How many college and university homepages have you been on and either couldn't find the library site or only found it circuitously?  Their reasons may be different from ours:  I don't know.  But something's going on, and it isnt right.  For you guys that have total control over all things Web, I can understand your non-comprehension of our plight.  But "bragging rights?  How about just plain survival, and the on-going struggle to get rid of impediments constantly being thrown in our way?

Craighton Hippenhammer
Information Technology Librarian
Olivet Nazarene University
Bourbonnais, Illinois
chhammer at olivet.edu



>>> Dan Lester <dan at riverofdata.com> 12/06/01 00:00 AM >>>

Wednesday, December 05, 2001, 9:40:35 PM, you wrote:

CH> Is anyone aware of a study that compares the use of academic library web pages to the use of the rest of the academic web site?  Most of the studies I've read tend to evaluate the library site
CH> use only.  What I'm interested in is how many hits do library pages get compared to academic non-library pages, perhaps broken down by department.

This could be interesting for bragging rights, but other than that,
what does it matter who gets the most?  I'd expect the library to get
more hits than departments, unless the departments' pages include
course content via Blackboard or some other similar system, or unless
the departmental sites include lots of student-owned pages.

Happy holidays,

dan

-- 
Dan Lester, Data Wrangler  dan at RiverOfData.com 208-283-7711
3577 East Pecan, Boise, Idaho  83716-7115 USA
www.riverofdata.com  www.gailndan.com  Stop Global Whining!



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