[WEB4LIB] RE: Library lingo

[Kraft, Michelle]

Does anybody notice any confusion between "Find Articles" (representing Databases) and getting a full text article out of an online journal. Specifically are patrons going to the "Find Articles" link to look for a specific article in a full text journal?  

Many of our users already have the citation to an article and they just want to find the full text of that specific article.  They go to our full text journals list on our web site to get the article full text.  

We too have noticed that the term "Databases" is foreign to a lot of users.  However, I am afraid that if we change it from "Databases" to "Find Articles" that we will just be creating another problem.  Those people who just want a specific article from the New England Journal of Medicine will be accidently guided to our list of databases to "find the article" and not realize that they should go to our list of online journals.

Michelle

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Michelle Kraft
Medical Librarian
Cleveland Clinic Library
Cleveland Clinic Foundation
9500 Euclid Ave
Cleveland, OH 44195
kraftm at ccf.org

-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib at webjunction.org]On Behalf Of Chris Jorgensen
Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2004 9:27 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] RE: Library lingo


Ranti,

We just redesigned our library website with the terminology limitations of
users in mind. We started by creating some personas (undergraduate student,
graduate students, faculty member), and trying to think of what terms are
meaningful to them. Our undergraduate student was our primary persona, and
hence we ended up with the Find Books, Find Articles set up for our research
resources. In our usability tests, even users who had never used the
library's web page before seemed to understand the Find Books, Find Articles
sections, which is what most students use our website for. Here's what it
looks like:

http://reinert.creighton.edu

I should give props to the University of British Columbia Library website
(http://www.library.ubc.ca/) that inspired our design.

Also, there was some concern among my Web Team that the faculty wouldn't be
happy with the "dumbing down" of the library website, but I read somewhere
(I'm sorry--I read so much on usability during this I can't be sure
where--it could be Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think") that users don't get
upset if something is too easy to use, and that made a lot of sense.

Hope this is informative,
Chris Jorgensen
Reference/Web Services Librarian
Reinert/Alumni Memorial Library
Creighton University
2500 California Plaza
Omaha, NE 68178
voice: 402.280.1757
fax: 402.280.2435
email: cjorgensen at creighton.edu




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