Effective Library Web Sites: How to Ask Your Users What Will Work for Them

摘要

Library web sites are becoming the primary gateway to information about library services, resources and policies. The quality of the organization and content of these web sites will determine the ease in which patrons and staff are able to locate needed information. Although there has been a great effort to develop library web sites, it has been difficult for librarians to find the time to test their effectiveness. After having a fairly stable web site for two years, librarians at Washington State University Vancouver (WSUV) Library decided to test the effectiveness of their library's web pages to find out if the organization and content of these pages were useful to their reference staff and patrons. Since the library had limited staff time and budget to spend on this project, the methods used needed to be simple, time efficient and involve little cost. Two librarians sorted through the various methodologies for testing and decided to use three tests: card sorting, category membership expectation and a short survey. In addition to testing the current organization and content of the library's web site, the combination of these three tests also demonstrated how the users would organize the library's web pages. This session will cover the general principles of each of these test methods, the planning involved in implementing each test, and the analysis of the test results. Presenters will provide an example of each test and a short bibliography of useful texts.