(also available as MS Word version)
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Library acquisitions websites made feasible: Goals, design, software, tech support, workflow. |
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John Riley, Eastern Books and Antje Mays, Winthrop University |
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Program Summary
Library Acquisitions websites are a growing presence among publicity methods geared at user communities. Who uses such web portals? For whom should they be designed? How complicated it is to design a good website? Is professional-quality design important? Why / Why not? What should be included on a web portal? How should a website be designed to best represent the content with the intended degree of effectiveness? Who should be responsible for this site? What do small libraries not blessed with large IT pools do? How do large libraries keep the design process from being compartmentalized into too many IT hands?
Elements of Good Web Design -- Dos and Don'ts -- Issues
- Style sheets / Design conformity: Depending on your organization’s web-design and media-relations policy, a library acquisitions website can experience huge variations of stylistic freedom. Be sure to check for any style-compliance issues before investing much effort and time into your site.
- Staff Pictures -- Personable or capricious? Fun? Or personal safety risk for victims of abuse and/or stalking?
- Group photos: Staff changes make initial group photos obsolete.
- Organization & design – does the site’s organization visually represent the information presented? Keep the design clean. Minimize clutter by resisting the temptation to pack maximum information on one page.
- Content – What to include? Let ongoing projects and acquisition staff’s information needs be your guide, especially in the beginning.
Technical aspects
- Scripts: Are they universally supported? If not, they will generate unwelcome script errors on viewers’ screens.
- Software: To start, see what software is available to choose from your university’s or parent organization’s licenses. There is no “right” or “wrong” software. Choose the software that best supports your workflow. If several people with differing levels of technical skill share site maintenance, choose a user-friendly “what you see is what you get” editor such as e.g. Netscape Composer or Frontpage.
- Technical support: How much technical support can you expect from library systems and/or organization-wide computing? Acquisitions teams with more technical expertise can fill the knowledge gap when computer departments do not offer much support. However, in absence of a readily available local pool of technological sophistication, delays and disappointments can be minimized by keeping the web-site simple.
- New acquisitions data and book lists: Be careful with vendor-specific performance data, to avoid negative reactions. For new-acquisitions lists with live links to the actual catalog record, Excel /Access programming and Expect Script take much of the “manual labor” out of generating the live web lists. Information on Expect Script (and the downloadable script itself) is at http://expect.nist.gov/.
- Linkages: Is the acquisitions site easy to find from the library’s main page, or is it “buried”?
Workflow issues
- How much work is involved? Initial set-up and design groundwork is time-consuming and planning stages can take several months. However, maintenance / content update is low – 1 hour per week or less on average.
- Workflow: Start small, begin with an electronic file already on hand, use software that is easy to use, tap Information Technology for specific knowledge, some libraries start with a committee but disband the committee after the design work is done and site maintenance goes to the department.
Point of interest – other than your staff, who else is looking at your site?
- Acquisitions sites as recruiting tool? Thoroughly-minded candidates look at the website of their target library to get a feel for workflow, procedures, “who does what”, and the collection development philosophy.
- Helpful hints for acquisitions practitioners at other institutions: Librarians at other institutions: Links to currency converters, vendors for materials by format and/or geographic regions, acquisitions and gift policies often provide inspiration and how-to-do-it examples to outside libraries seeking to improve their own processes.
- Vendors: for identifying the most fruitful library contact information by gleaning an idea of workflow & processes.
Webography
- MTSU Acquisitions -- http://www.mtsu.edu/~vvesper/acq.html
- Technical Services Unlimited (Virginia Beach Public Library; co-sponsored by UCSD). Good example of collaborative effort. http://tpot.ucsd.edu/TSU/
- Trinity College -- Library Technical Services -- http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/libtech/
- University of Florida -- links for American universities http://www.clas.ufl.edu/CLAS/american-universities.html
- University of Northern Iowa -- Rod Library Acquisitions -- http://www.library.uni.edu/acq/
- Univ of Virginia -- Acquisitions Department -- http://www.lib.virginia.edu/acquisitions/
- Winthrop Univ Library Acq portal -- http://faculty.winthrop.edu/maysa/AcqTools/AcqDept_VerifyTitles.html
John Riley, Eastern Books and Antje Mays, Winthrop University