[WEB4LIB] Database in your face? [Summary]

[Sarah Graham]

Hi all

I received a lot of interesting responses to my post about the naming of the
section of the library web site that lists journal article databases. It is
clear that many libraries are struggling with the same issue, and opinions
about how to solve the problem are very diverse. Much of the diversity of
opinion comes from whether you think the library web site should be
prescriptive or descriptive--Whether design should reflect the reality of
how information gets created and published, or whether information should be
organized around the searchers way of looking for information. I personally
am coming from the standpoint that we have to design for the majority use by
the majority of our users, so was most interested in the comments and
feedback from people who had tested their terms and ideas. 

I think there is one interesting trend from libraries that have been doing
lots of "card sort" type tests, and that is to create a big sub section of
the web site and to put the Library Catalog (Find Books) together with
Journal Databases (Find Articles) and Journal Lists (Find Journals). Some
people are calling this "Search Our Collections" (This is the MIT Libraries'
term - Nicole Hennig has excellent notes on their library's web site
redesign at http://macfadden.mit.edu:9500/webgroup/project.html), some are
calling it "Resources" (The Simmons library site does this
http://www.simmons.edu/libraries/) and another term is "Research Tools."
However, the big negative response to this approach from librarians is that
this sometimes means the removal of a prominent link to the library catalog
on the front page (depending on the design).

I got a big number of responses from librarians telling me what term they
had used. This is a good (earlier) summary of the different choices:
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Web4Lib/archive/0008/0026.html 

Other responses:

"This is the old "OPAC" vs. "Find Books" debate. Your users "don't relate"
because they aren't accostomed to the overlapping intermediate steps to
finding library information (cf Google). Short of educating users about
databases and cataloges, there's only so much dumbing down you can do with
the terminology for the array of search tools a library offers."

"We have several links - - one to E-journals, one to databases, one to The
Reference Shelf - - and there is a lot of overlap in what that gets you to.
There are databases on the Reference Shelf, and E-journals in the databases
lists, etc.  I don't object to having more than one link to the same thing.
So when someone calls asking for something that is out there I usually try
to find out where they looked and put it there, too."

"We try to address this issue with "Find Articles & More" and "Search for
articles on your topic."
We do use the word "database" but try not to emphasize it. The students that
we tested in our usability study usually started their search by selecting a
"database by subject."
 
http://www.tcnj.edu/~library/beta/
http://www.tcnj.edu/~library/beta/find_articles.html
http://www.tcnj.edu/~library/beta/psychology.html"

"We asked a small sample of users to group a miscellaneous set of resources
=
into any set(s) that they wanted and then lable these sets.  We found that =
numerous people, although not the majority, used verbs in their lables =
(i.e. "Find a book") and the most common lable assigned to groups that =
were mostly citation databases was "Search" (or its close relatives =
("searching")).  Hence, when we placed a group of such databases on our =
page, we labled this set "Search"."

"Librarians who know that your databases have more than just journals are
not your primary users.  Unless the majority of your users are looking for
that "other stuff," I believe you/we are making things much more difficult
by not labeling content in language your/our users understand."

"This is what we call them on our webpage.  We made the change a few months
ago.  It has helped.

Find Books, Videos, Etc. 
Find Articles in Journals, Magazines 
Find Articles in Newspapers 
Find Magazines, Journals, Newspapers by Title 
Find Articles by Topic in Magazines, Newspapers 
Print Magazines, Newspapers, Journals arranged by Topic 
Encyclopedias, Almanacs, Internet, Reference 
Course, Reserve, ILL 
Special Collections 
Help and What's New at the Library "

The whole process has made me much more committed to usability testing -
I've come to the conclusion that the less guessing about what students
know/don't know the better (and also helps to defuse some of the arguments
of opinion that go on in web development meetings!)

Sarah
______________________________
Sarah Graham
Coordinator of Web Development/Reference Librarian
Emerson College Library

email: sarah_graham at emerson.edu
phone: (617) 824-8332
fax:   (617) 824-7811
______________________________