[WEB4LIB] website training and review - what works?

[Daniel Messer]

In addition to student and faculty focus groups, you might try sending a 
little survey out to the students and faculty at large. Maybe drop some in 
the professors' mailboxes and have them distribute to their classes. 
Something like this was done several times while I was in college and it 
seemed to work well. How you want them returned is up to you, but some profs 
might object to collecting them and returning them. The reason for this being 
that sometimes focus groups don't quite match the student and faculty 
population at large and you might get a whole bunch of people in the group 
that can't find X, but the real problem is that the rest of the students 
can't find Y.

Another thing you might try, especially after you've discovered your specific 
needs, is to distribute bookmarks or something like that with the library's 
URL on it and maybe some FAQs. I understand what your admins are trying to 
accomplish, after all trying to "sell" the college to people who already go 
there is like preaching to the choir. Yet the library's site should pretty 
much be geared directly for the current students as they are the folks that 
will use it the most.

Good luck!
Dan

Carrie Phillips <phillipsc at bluffton.edu> said:

> Greetings, WEB4LIB,
> 
> These questions are geared to those of you in academic library settings...
> 
> Here's our situation:
> 
> Our campus has recently overhauled its website design and architecture, and
> I've had to redesign the library portion of the campus site to match
> visually.  We're now hearing two-fold rumors about campus that students are
> having trouble finding our library home page from the campus home page, and
> that once they do find us, they are having trouble knowing where to go to
> find what they need (research databases, etc.).
<SNIP!>
> The second part is easy to fix, since we have complete control of the
> library portion of the website architecture (once the patron finds us on the
> campus site), but we're not sure how to fix it.  We'd like to form both
> student and faculty focus groups to sit down with us and tell us what they
> can find on our site and what they can't.  Have any of you tried this?  Is
> it a good way to work this kind of a problem out?

-- 
The subject in question...
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Daniel Messer
Technologies Instructor
Yakima Valley Regional Library
dmesser at yvrls.lib.wa.us
509-452-8541 ext 712
102 N 3rd St  Yakima, WA  98901
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When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
                                         -Hunter S. Thompson