Recently I've come to recognize a growing passion of mine as a librarian: improving access to our resources. I'm always amazed when I see the numbers for what our college and CUNY central spends each year on the physical objects that wind up in our catalog (e.g., books, periodicals, CDs, DVDs), on licensed resources (e.g., databases), and web services (e.g., Serials Solutions). Our students and faculty have (in theory) access to such an amazing collection of stuff, and yet they are frequently stymied in so many little ways from being aware of what we have or from being able to find and access what they know we have.
I get excited when I hear about tools such as
federated search and
link resolvers that will begin to unify our data silos (databases, catalogs, institutional repositories, etc.) It's heartening to hear talk at the just concluding
Internet Librarian conference (blog posts on the conference
here) of
creating a user-friendly skin for your ILS instead of, to quote
Roy Tennant, "putting lipstick on a pig" by adding a few bells and whistles to your off-the-shelf ILS user interface.
Our users encounter so many road blocks related to access that they shouldn't have to deal with:
- clicking a "full-text" link in a database (or in SFX) that takes them to an e-journal page informing them that the library does not in fact have access to that article
- registering for access to an e-book collection (ebrary, netLibrary) and downloading some sort of reader software before they can begin using that one title found in a catalog search
- not seeing or recognizing the core database in their field of inquiry in a frighteningly long list of database options
- remote access systems that don't work well or at all with some our licensed resources
- databases that insist on tantalizing users with links to resources that are part of a more expensive subscription we have declined to buy
What are some of the other basic access issues that are driving you and your users crazy? Please post your thoughts as a comment on this blog entry.
