So what do you think? I am hoping to get a discussion going here. Should Information Librarians be able to call their new guides LibGuides rather than Subject Guides?
Are we throwing away a marketing and promotional opportunity by not using the new term? LibGuides is a short and snappy term that indicates the library is changing direction by offering a new range of ways for students and staff to interact with librarians.
Why are we calling them Subject Guides when this refers to the old format? After all, we did change the name to subject guides when we last changed the format. Why are we not changing the name this time? If LibGuides is still in the URL, why don’t we adapt that short and simple name?
You may think the UoC changes the branding of different parts of the University too often without changing the actual activities of the departments. Or do you think that Subject Guides is actually what we are still doing and that we haven’t actually made the transition to LibGuides yet….but we may get there in a few months.
Have your say now
How about we ask students? I think we’re too close to the terms to know how students will react to them – often they understand library jargon differently than we do. They might think that "LibGuide" is too slogany, or they might think that "Subject Guide" doesn’t have enough to do with the library – hard to tell.
I think a few of us are sending out links to various groups to gauge early feedback – we could include this question in our email to them. And/or we could put up a poll on Library News.
(I surveyed some uni summer school students a few years back about jargon, with completely open-ended questions – the results of what they prefered for this concept were murky but if anyone’s interested it’s <a href="http://deborahfitchett.com/…">online</a> (pdf) – discussion at page 66 and raw results in the first column of p107-8.)
Deborah
The question raised is interesting but changes cannot make in 2009. In my role as marketing and publicity person for the library I have discussed this with various managers in the library last year as we prepared the 2009 Library Guide and other marketing material. This question should have been raised with me.
The advertising and publicity has been set for 2009 using the term Subject Guides and cannot be changed at this late stage. Subject Guides is an excellent term that I feel students will relate too.
Some thought and discussed has already taken place about this development. There did not seem to be compelling arguments for changing the terminology this year or in the future.
Research would need to be conducted with students that strongly showed a change is needed.
I believe that Web usability testing conducted by Library IT resulted in the Library using this term, Subject Guide rather than subject portals. The term Subject Guide needs time to be established. Changing it now without further analysis would be pointless. If we continue to change names of our services then we cannot establish familiarity with any of our words we use to describe our services.
Library Users don’t get told to look at Horizon – rather the Library Catalogue -The term Horizon is the Library’s internal Jargon; that is how a marketing perspective views these types of changes – the term LibGuides is Library staff jargon. Because new software or changes in processes occur this does not result in an automatic name change for a branded service.
I would be happy to discuss this further with you.
Thanks
Sharon
I agree with Sharon that it is too late to change but whatever we call the service the name should refer to the content not the format. I was never in favour of UC Opportunity, it was a marketing fad that their users did not understand and they have now returned to Continuing and Bridging Education. It seems to me that LibGuides is a similar piece of jargon (unless it gets the kind of market share that makes the term universally understood like Google or Facebook). The content and purpose of the Subject Guides has not changed, and like the catalogue can continue to evolve in format and functionality without a name change. But, as Deborah says, we should check what our students think. Cheers, Anne
As 90% of libraries using LibGuides call their guides LibGuides I would suggest that the term already has market share.
Calling the guides subject guides risks confusing our students with previous guides. These are different and will continue to evolve away from the existing guides. They use Web 2 technology. We should be emphasising this, not downplaying it
… I have been working on LibGuides for months. Noone told me about the decision to call them subject guides until Thursday last week …..
Sharon is correct that we have already asked some students what we should call the subject guides. We did this when we did the usability testing on the then named "subject portals". After the students had almost consistently not used the subject portals for the sorts of questions that the subject portals were designed to be useful for, we showed them the subject portals. They almost all commented how useful they would be, but that they hadn’t seen them before. We then asked them what would be a good thing to call them – something they might notice. The word "portal" was too jargony for them. However, they all approved of the word "subject" in the name.
Going on that evidence I think it would be a backward step to call them LibGuides. The word LibGuides doesn’t even look or sound like anything to do with the Library – I don’t think that most people would equate Lib with Library.
Catherine
I would suggest continuing to use the term "Subject Guides", as likely to be more meaningful to students.
It’s unlikely that students will be familiar with other libraries round the world using LibGuides software, so I doubt the advantage of recognition is there.
I also wonder about how important Web 2.0-type functionality actually is on library Web pages? I would expect participatory/collaborative elements of 2.0 to be most useful within students’ course pages (Blackboard, etc.)
Other elements of 2.0 such as RSS are great, though I’d not seen much take-up (or even awareness) of RSS by staff or students at Lincoln. Perhaps it’s different here?
I would guess most students are simply looking for information that will help them in their studies. The less jargon we use the better, I think.
John
(Going off on a tangent) RSS is insanely useful — but most people don’t want to understand or think about it, any more than I want to understand or think about electricity when I flick a lightswitch. I’m coming to the conclusion that we shouldn’t be teaching RSS feeds, we should be teaching applications (like Bloglines, Google Reader, etc) for purposes (keeping up with tables of contents, search alerts, etc). If we can do it without saying the word "RSS" then we’re doing it right.
Deborah
Subject Guides – does what it says on the tin.
As a term, ‘LibGuides’ really only works for SpringShare, whose aim is to build brand recognition among our profession, rather than among our targeted users.
Love the technology – have no affection for the name.
Grant.
I strongly support the use of "subject guides" as that is hopefully what our pages are, regardless of what technology or brand is used to produce them.