We’ve just started talking amongst ourselves at the Library about the purpose of our subject guide pages (see Architecture & Design’s Subject Guide for an example). I’m really excited to be talking about these at last. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot, over the past year an a half that I’ve been here at Victoria.
The comments in the two articles Rachel (our new Head of Research and Learning Services) gave us to read do hit close to home for me–
“…academic librarians devote much manpower to the development and maintenance of [online subject guides], but relatively little is done to monitor their use by patrons”
–I probably do spend more time thinking and worrying about the Architecture and Design subject pages than their usage by patrons probably warrants! However, I believe that online subject resources can be very useful; I’m really interested in developing them further and figuring out their role in the wider academic experience.
I think the point that both articles make about the need for usability testing is important. I think it would be excellent if we could run some tests and focus groups of our own to discover exactly how different user groups make use of our web spaces and resources. We have a real opportunity now, as we’re looking forward to re-designing our website, to test the existing site and get a lot of feedback from users - before we’re invested in a new design. We can be critical, and open-minded about making changes, trying new things, because we know that we’ll be moving in a new direction soon.
This is a grab-bag of a few of my thoughts on online Subject Guides after reading the articles (more…)
