At my institution, the library's web presence predates the university as a
whole's presence. We currently share a server with the main university site
but have control over all our content and can make updates without having
to go through public relations (thank goodness). Our site is linked from
the main university site in at least two places (along the bottom of the
main page and within a drop down menu). When eCollege was our LMS, we were
also linked from courses by default but it appears that is no longer the
case in Sakai, which I suspect was an oversight and not a conscious
decision.

It strikes me as really strange to have the library that hidden - wouldn't
the institution want prospective students, faculty, and administrators to
be able to see the resources available? What are peer institutions doing?

Ellen

Ellen Knowlton Wilson
Instructional Services Librarian
Room 250, Marx Library
University of South Alabama
5901 USA Drive North
Mobile, AL 36688
(251) 460-6045



On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 8:40 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
>