The design of this page strikes me as being appalling. I hope we do not intend to change from our existing Subjects Guides’ page, which in comparison has a clean and functional design.
Disappointing aspects of the Libguide’s “Subject Guides Home” (LSGH) for a student “Alex” who is looking for a particular subject, e.g. Forestry
* Alex clicks the Forestry link on the left menu box. Instead of going straight to the subject guide Alex is presented with yet another page! If Alex then clicks Forestry in the menu box at right, Alex gets into a vicious circle. If Alex manages to click the Forestry link at left instead, the Forestry subject guide finally appears.
* If Alex is studying a subject other than Forestry, it may not even appear in the LSGH menu box! Alex may have to guess what broader subject area it appears under first, e.g. Accounting and Information Systems. (No guessing required on our existing page, of course).
* Alex is presented with “popular tags” on LSGH. Alex doesn’t care; Forestry is what is wanted – and Forestry seems to be an unpopular tag (what message is that supposed to convey to Alex?!)
* Alex is presented with “Featured Guides”. Alex doesn’t care; Forestry is what is wanted – and Forestry isn’t a “Featured Guide” – nor a “Popular Guide” either (again, what message is that supposed to convey to Alex?!)
* Alex is presented with a random “Featured Author”. Alex doesn’t care; Forestry is what is wanted – and this author doesn’t help people studying Forestry!
So in short, most of the information on the LSGH is irrelevant for a student with a particular information need, and the navigation is simply bad.
John
I have asked LibGuides if they would consider having a direct link to the subject guide where there was only one guide in that subject category. It would be quite easy to achieve.
They said "We decided to go against this because it would introduce an inconsistent behavior, i.e. if there are more than one guides per category a student would go to one place when clicking on a category name, while if there is only one guide, it would take them to the guide page. For many users this would become confusing, as it is an inconsistent behavior – you are clicking on the same links (categories) but getting different behavior. Also, we certainly hope that libraries will have more than one guide for each category :)"
I don’t agree, library catalogues work this way and I think that convenience would outweigh consistency in this case. We had quite a robust (but friendly) discussion on the matter!
They have said they might reconsider this at a later date, but I’m not holding my breath.
Catherine
If you spent most of the second week of term telling 780 ENGR101 students to "Click on ‘Subject Guides’, then click on ‘Engineering’, then click on ‘Engineering’ *again*, and then finally you get to choose your subject" then you’d probably be a lot more enthusiastic about the LibGuides layout.
Alex might find the search bar at the top useful, which lets you type in ‘forestry’ and get the Forestry subject guide at the top — followed by related topics like Civil Engineering and Biological Sciences. (Electrical Engineering is a glitch which I know the reason for and have been meaning to fix; not the fault of LibGuides.)
The LibGuides layout also allows interdisciplinary guides to gain prominence, which our own layout would struggle with; and allows what Cornell and Princeton’s study called "Custom" guides eg guides on a specific event, which we haven’t looked at yet but which have proved very popular for them.
There’ll always be a balance between a subject label being too specific (only one guide coming up) and too vague (so students don’t know what to pick). But how we use them can minimise this. If something could come under two or more labels then we can attach it to two or more labels: eg here we’ve put Forestry under both Forestry and Engineering. The confusion of the tags could also be minimised if as information librarians we get together and work out which kinds of tags are helpful and which are just clutter.
But, as someone who has long hated our current subject guides table of contents, I think the libguides toc is a tremendous improvement. Our toc gives only one way to find things: a single list of alphabetised subjects (except that, where every language gets listed individually, every branch of engineering is lumped together – and I say this as an ex-language and linguistics student). LibGuides lets you find it by category, by tag, by search, and by serendipity. It increases the options for the students – and it looks a heck of a lot prettier.
Deborah
I think it would be very timely to have an information librarians forum to discuss the finer points of libguides now that we have launched or are nearly ready to launch the change. A very few years ago we spent hours striving for some consistency in the "portals or guides" for ease of student access and this concept seems to have flown out the window of late. Could we hold a discussion in the week beginning 20th April in the Law Dojo? Suggestions for day and time welcomed. We could also discuss the plan for the way forward with new ideas – for example, should the Library have a facebook page??
Thanks, Sue
I agree an infolibs forum would be a good idea. Any reason why we shouldn’t have it sooner? 🙂
Regarding Facebook, Alison J and I were asked last year to create a demo page for the IATL report-back. This is at http://tinyurl.com/bhqhtx We never linked or advertised it anywhere but have slowly accumulated 23 fans somehow anyway, so we’ve proposed that the library consider whether to delete the profile, leave it as it is, or maintain it. (Should need about an hour to update it and then something on the order of a minute a day to keep it maintained.)
We’ve met with BLT and will be meeting with LLT next Tuesday. If anyone has any views on the subject one way or another, please either post them here or email me or Alison Johnston and we’ll take those along to LLT.
Deborah
Re facebook – I understand this is a place of social interaction, not a forum for a serious university degree course. I believe staff time would be better on moodle, the teaching management system to be,(and our own library pages of course!), as moodle is where the students will already be for their course work. I would vote to delete the profile on facebook, should a vote be held. Thanks, Sue
Just steering the discussion back to Liguides Subject Home for a moment -my gripe with it is that it doesn’t show half my subjects!. Somehow they have been clumped into a group called Languages Cultures and Linguistics. ‘Alex’ above might be frustrated in clicking Forsetry twice, but ‘Alexis’ stuying Fench is not going to see her subject at all, and may (or may not) think to look under ‘L’ for it. Typing French into the search box is not particularly helpful either – you are offered Medieval French which is just a topic guide, not the Home page for French. Likewise a search for ‘German’ brings up the list of German journals, but not German home. (Perhaps I have done something wrong with my tags??? advice welcome!).
These little subjects are never going to make it onto the most popular list, nor into the popular tags category, yet statistics show that the guides ARE being used. I would not like to see a move to the Libguides Subject Home which seems very driven by mass appeal and obscures the low-student-number subjects.
If we listed all our subjects the list would be 70+ long as opposed to the current 32. (Or 161 long if going by http://www.canterbury.ac.nz… – don’t worry, I automated the counting. 🙂 ) One alternative might be to list by college (6); or by department (35).
The search box doesn’t currently index tags, just page content – is that something we could ask SpringShare to change?
Deborah
Perhaps when all the guides are published we can look at ways to enhance the navigation and look at opportunities for the further development of libguides? There is still more potential in this programme that we are not using; we should not be looking only at replicating what was already offered through the existing subject pages.
I am looking forward to working with other librarians in Engineering and Dave in Central to produce Hazard and Disaster management guides (this is offered as a degree and attracts a lot of students), Engineering Geology, Biotechnology and other guides to reflect the subject majors awarded in Biological sciences.
I think our students are an increasingly sophisticated group of digital native computer users too. Afterall, they are operating in a Youtube, Facebook, Meebo, Moodle, kind of environment….. We also expect them to navigate through incredibly complex links from databases to full text resources that all operate in very different ways. Lets not get stuck on this issue.
I know the chances of all Information Librarians agreeing on anything is usually zero but lets try and look for a way forward that is positive.
sdj19 – For reference we had a lecturer come in last year and specifically ask about using Facebook for a "serious" course. In this case it was particularly serious (to do with Global Warming) and he was wanting to use it (and did) because it offered functionality that neither Moodle nor Blackboard could offer.
Re: Subject list
If you can easily get to them is there really a problem with listing all the subjects (or at least the ones we have guides for) as per the university subject list?
http://www.canterbury.ac.nz…
After all who are we to invent a different list to what the students are being told by the University?
I like the UC Irvine approach that makes it relatively easy to find them even though there are heaps…
http://libguides.lib.uci.edu/
And as for Tags? Well that is another story.
Tags…. I am sure this issue can be reexamined when all the guides are up. We cannot expect perfection in one step… ( or in many steps probably…)
I like Johns Hopkins setup (see http://guides.library.jhu.e…).
It looks as though they expect their users to click the Browse A-Z list by default – I think the A-Z is the easiest way to get quickly to a specific guide. The A-Z also has the option to sort by "subject" clusters.
John
I think we should be making better use of the Featured Guide option too… This should ideally be changed on a weekly basis and this will give guides like French centre Stage for a while… The problem is deciding what to include. I hoped that librarians would volunteer their own work and request that it appear up front and centre, particularly if they will be using it for a class or a particular assignment
I think there is a real usability issue regarding using the Featured Guides option to highlight particular guides. If French is featured one week and Jo Blogs uses it to access French from a very visible part of the page, next week he might be very confused if it’s no longer in that list.
I have real doubts about the usefulness of this whole area of the libguides homepage – won’t students be focused on finding their particular subject guide and find the featured, most popular guides and recent guides irrelevant and an irritating waste of a large part of the page? I think this area of the site is there for librarians’ interest, not students.
I would strongly recommend that a group is set up to look at the content and layout of this page SOON, well before we use it as the page linked to from the Subject Guides link on all our web pages. We have a certain amount of control – for instance we can move any of the existing content boxes around, remove any of the boxes from the display, and create an "Info/Alert Homepage Content Box" into which we can put pretty much any content we like, and I think we could probably put this in the top of the middle column.
Catherine
Just to let you know that my document about LibGuides issues will be discussed at the BLT meeting next week, with the recommendation that a group be set up to examine these issues. Naturally the group will take all the above comments into consideration.
Janette
I would have thought "Featured" was rather self explanatory and very useful for anything topical – e.g. the Eng assignment at the beginning of the year. If there isn’t anything needing special highlighting then how about just randomly rotating them?
Equally I think the "Recent" option is also useful – particularly if you go back to see if a new topic guide has been created within your subject or to see if a subject guide has been created recently when one wasn’t previously there.
Most popular I am not too sure about but it is kind of entertaining and perhaps gets people wondering.
Tags are not really working but I think that may be how we are using them.
Overall though I would have thought as we are still really Libguides virgins it would make sense to stick to the defaults wherever possible for the short to medium term.
We may be inexperienced with the use of LibGuides, but we are not inexperienced in usability issues on web pages. For that reason, I think we need to look at this page from a student perspective and design our own version of the page that makes it easy for students to find the subject guides they are looking for. The options like Featured, Most Popular etc might be nice to browse, but they are not key functions for students on this page, so I think should not occupy prime real estate.
As far as I can see it’s not possible to rotate featured guides randomly – you specify some, or if none are specified this tab doesn’t display. We could ask LibGuides if this could be an enhancement.
Catherine
I agree with Catherine. The "featured" and tag cloud are too hit-and-miss or ephemeral to be of ongoing usefulness to students in navigating to a subject page. I don’t want students to be able to find a subject guide for a week or so, but on an ongoing basis over weeks, months, even years.(And personally I find tag clouds ugly – though that’s just a matter of taste, I suppose; more seriously they give an impression that popular/common = important/significant, which I feel is often plain wrong, particularly in academia).
If we want to make a subject guide more readily accessible than an A-Z list allows, a link off the relevant course Web page (Blackboard/Moodle) is far more likely to be useful. The course Web page is where students are most likely to be "at" when studying online.
John
Catherine/John – We are making a bit of an assumption here that our users are already having trouble finding what they want. I would suggest if the tags and subjects are set up adequately they will be perfectly capable of finding the appropriate guide as many times over as they need to. They do also have the options of A-Z and Search.
"Featured" in my view serves a reasonably important purpose – i.e. showing which Guide(s) are topical. Given this I would have thought "Featured" at least deserved some real estate.
Catherine – by rotate randomly I meant manually e.g. alphabetically or whatever – rather than in any automated way.
John – Given that they are not really user generated tags but effectively Librarian assigned categories I wouldn’t have thought "popularity" indicated anything particularly non-academic. Just because something is tagged "Science" does that make it any less academic or is it just indicating a broader category that applies to a series of guides?
We in Law invite all information librarians to a discussion with the libguides/index on a datashow in the Dojo on Tuesday April 21st, 9.15am. Heather is approving of us taking time from our branches to meet in one place and have a full and frank discussion. I know I would personally find this very helpful. Looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible.
Thanks, Sue