I've never heard of an entire library site being buried behind an
authentication portal. That's just crazy to me. (If you use universal
authentication, I'm sure it's nice that once students have signed in,
they can access/use all the services, but sometimes people want to look
something up quickly, like hours or just check to see if you have a book.)

At my old university, we were demoted from a top-level link to a
drop-down link (originally under "Student Services" and then moved to
"Research".) That school used two different CMS's for the administrative
sites (CommonSpot) and the academic sites (Typo3). Since I left, they've
united all the sites in Drupal.

At my current institution, the library is listed in a "quick links" drop
down in the top right corner of the homepage, which is pretty visible,
and also on the "Academics and Research" page, which is a top-level link
on the homepage.

Here, every department is responsible for their own website, so we
recently built our site in WordPress (the school uses Drupal.)

While I was severely annoyed at my old job when we got dropped from a
top-level to secondary navigation link, I think it's appropriate to list
the library under either "Academics" or "Research". "Student Services" I
think is less intuitive, as students often think of the library as a
place or a list of resources, and not a service, but that's just my opinion.

I also agree with those that said the library should have it's own
template or CMS. University sites are often driven by admissions, and
focus on visual and multimedia content (how many university sites
feature a giant carousel of campus shots? Ugh.) The library, on the
other hand, should be able to focus on resources, and while displaying
images from digital collections can be nice, using up that much prime
real estate for something with so little function is usually not the
best practice (often that prime spot is used for some sort of tabbed
search box.)

I've been working with academic library websites for 8 years now, so I
figured I'd just weigh in with my 2 cents ;)

Happy holidays!

~val

Valerie Forrestal
Web Services Librarian/Asst. Professor
City University of New York
College of Staten Island Library
2800 Victory Blvd., 1L-109I
Staten Island, N.Y. 10314
Phone: 718.982.4023
[log in to unmask]


>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Matthew Sherman
> Sent: Tuesday, December 17, 2013 8:41 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




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