This is a passion of mine, actually. I judge an institution by how easy it is to find the link to the library on the home page of the university. Call me picky, but if I can't find a link to the library easily on that front page, then I think they are not serious about research. What you describe is far worse than I thought possible...

Lisa

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Elizabeth "Lisa" McAulay
Librarian for Digital Collection Development
UCLA Digital Library Program
http://digital.library.ucla.edu/
email: emcaulay [at] library.ucla.edu
________________________________________
From: Code for Libraries [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Matthew Sherman [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, December 17, 2013 6:40 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [CODE4LIB] Academic Library Website Question

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