Matt,

Not odd at all! I've dealt with this issue for most of my career. In
the three academic libraries I've worked in, the library's site was
NOT part of the overall college/university portal. In fact, it was
more the case that we (me, the web person, and my supervisors) were
establishing our autonomy apart from the overall institutional web
presence with campus IT. Library sites need separate navigation,
information architecture, and content management and strategy.
Administrators outside of the library and campus IT don't always
understand how complex library sites have become, so explaining this
is a good first step. Find some sites for similar institutions that
you like, and show them as examples. If you present it as a positive
move--and point out that you might be able to take some work off your
IT department's hands by taking on the library site yourself--they'll
likely be more willing to consider it. Approach them as partners.

As far as burying the library's site behind a log in, how much
non-student traffic do you have in your building? You might be able to
make a case, based on that and what your mission to serve your
community is/might be, to bring it out from behind authentication.

Other questions for you:

-Do you have any kind of proxy authentication for journal/article
databases in place in addition to the portal authentication? If not,
you'll obviously have to consider that.
-What platform is the school on? Would you choose something
similar--another instance of the same software--or go out on your own?
Do you have the skills/staff to do that? Where would you host it?

Nina


On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 7:40 AM, Matthew Sherman
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi Code4Libbers,
>
> Slightly odd question for you academic library folks.  Why does your
> library have its website where it is on the university site?  For context,
> the library I currently work at has our library site hidden within the
> campus intranet/portal, so that students have to log into a web portal to
> even see the search page.  This was a decision by the previous director who
> was here before my time and an assortment of us librarians think this is a
> terrible setup.  So I wanted to kick out to the greater community to give
> us good reasons for free to the website to more general access, or help us
> to understand why you would bury it behind a login like they did.  All
> thoughts, insights, and opinions are welcome, they all help us develop our
> thinking on this and our arguments for any changes we want to make.  Thanks
> everyone and have a good week.
>
> Matt Sherman



-- 
Nina McHale
@ninermac
Developer, Aten Design Group
atendesigngroup.com