[Web4lib] How to label the OPAC

[Jim Campbell]

Catalog has value as a name and after the first week or so of school (all
this in an academic context) so does the local catalog name and it's not
unreasonable to expect students to know those things. But the opac is only
one one of what may in a large library be 100's of finding tools. How you
refer to to the opac when you tell someone to walk over to that computer and
click on the icon for Library Catalog and and how you structure your Web
pages so that an undergraduate sitting in a dorm room at 2:00 AM or a remote
student sitting at work 100 miles from campus can get quickly to a piece of
information are two different things.

We are in the middle of a Web redesign and among our principal goals are to
make our pages more task oriented and to provide guidance for our users in
performing common tasks. To that end we will have a toolbar - tabs and
dropdown menus - across the top of all our pages - Web site, opac,
metasearch tool, whatever. We're still arguing about (err, discussing) exact
contents and wording. but at this point on all pages the first two tabs and
their dropdowns are

1. Find Books, etc. 		(links to opac basic search)
	Search Virgo Library Catalog 		(same thing)
	Advanced Search
	DVDs and Videos
	Audio recordings
	Manuscripts
	Browse by call number
	Multisearch (our metasearch tool)
	Library Web site search
Down to Multisearch each of these is a link to a specific search form in our
opac.



2. Find Articles, etc.   (a web page with links, descriptions and
multisearch checkboxes for  all our indexing/abstracting tools)
	Multisearch		(same thing)
	By discipline	(subject guides)
	By citation		(use Open URL resolver to find a known item)
	E-journals by title	(look up in resolver knowledgebase)	
	E-journals A-Z		(browse from our resolver knolwedgebase)
	Reference sources 	(Web pages on various topics - the piece
that needs most work)

 
- Jim Campbell
 
Digital Access Coordinator and Librarian for German
E-Mail: Campbell at Virginia.Edu | Voice: 434-924-4985
 
Digital Access Services, University of Virginia Library
http://www.lib.virginia.edu/digital/das/
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org 
> [mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of 
> bernhard Eversberg
> Sent: Monday, July 25, 2005 10:17 AM
> To: web4lib at webjunction.org
> Subject: Re: [Web4lib] How to label the OPAC
> 
> Richard Wiggins wrote:
> > Is there any audience, no matter how experienced, for whom 
> "find books" 
> > *doesn't* work?
> >  /rich
> 
> At least, since "books" doesn't cover it all, one would have 
> to extend it a bit and say "find stuff".
> While I'd agree with this, I still feel the necessity to have 
> a noun and to use it in public.
> Or how else can we refer to "it" when mentioning a catalog as a tool?
> Also, while they may be in need of upgrading, catalogs are 
> not really obsolete. Good catalogs remain cornerstones of 
> good library work. We are doing nobody a service if we try to 
> obscure their very existence and their character either by 
> cryptic neologisms (and a different one in every other 
> library) or by language that doesn't even put a name on them.
> 
> Regards,
> Bernhard Eversberg
> Universitätsbibliothek Braunschweig
> 
> 
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