WHAT SHOULD YOU PUT ON YOUR LIBRARY'S WEB SITE?
The answer, as is so often the case, is "that depends."
Because first you have to answer at least two other questions:
1. What do you want to accomplish with your web site?
2. What are your library's special strengths, which you would like to see reflected in your web page?
Start with the first question. Whether you intend it to be or not, your library web page is your most obvious public relations vehicle, the way many people will first make your acquaintance. This means that you want it to look as professional as you do. It should be clearly organized, neat, easy on the eyes, inviting, and accessible to the handicapped. At a bare minimum, it should tell people where to find you, how to call you, the name of your director, and your hours of service.
But what else would you like to use it for? An interactive medium of communication with your patrons? Consider an online reference desk or bulletin boards (you might even post some of the tricky questions you fielded). A way of publicizing your services and special collections? You might post your new books list here, or post the text and selected pictures from recent displays or exhibitions.
Would you like to use this opportunity to teach your users research methods? You could post tutorials on line, like "how to do genealogy research", or "how to use the online catalog." A place to share enthusiasm about the library's new books, CDs and videos? Have your staff members write reviews--or maybe even better, invite your patrons to, and post them. Do you want to publicize upcoming library events? You could post a calendar and your press releases for them.
Do you want to use it to offer traditional library services--books, magazines, reference sources--when the library is closed? Select and organize some high quality web sites, and consider delivering full-text databases by way of the web. Would you like to use it to enlist community support, and increase the number of "friends of the library"? You could have a page on which you regularly honor the contributions of your volunteers and donors. Would you like to create a friendly online children's room to encourage your young users in their love for reading? Offer them some carefully chosen web sites, and give them a chance to post their own book reviews and writing online.
Your answers to those questions suggest possible kinds of content. But so does the question, "what do we do and own that is of unique value?" The web offers us the opportunity to share those resources. Do you have a photo archive of local history? You could scan some of the photos and put them online along with some historical text. Are you the keeper of your company's or university's newspapers, annual reports, yearbooks, company histories? You could put them online, or at least create an online index to them.
My library is a diocesan library, and one way we could serve the local Catholic community would be offering a place for local churches to post their parish histories online. All of us could create Frequently Asked Questions pages for the topics we specialize in. We could do oral history projects and post them online.
One more thing--whatever you set out to do, be ready to change it as your patrons make suggestions. Make it easy for them to give you their ideas by making a clear statement of who is responsible for the web page and inviting them to e-mail comments. You could even give them a sense of ownership by allowing them to contribute to your pages, with book reviews, oral history, or just your online responses to their comments or suggestions.
Your web page is such a good way of not just telling your users, but showing them, who you are and what you can do to serve them. All you have to do is start by answering those two questions: what do we want our page to do, and how can we showcase the things that make us unique?
USING YOUR WEB SITE STATISTICS
One of the things I have learned from years of working with the River Bend Library System is that statistics generate cash and respect. They are the underpinning for successful grant proposals. They are how we measure what we're doing and prove our value.
What kinds of statistics we can get from our servers, and how they are organized and presented, will depend on the statistical software we use. We should at the very least be able to tell on a daily, weekly or monthly basis how many hits each individual page is getting. We can then chart these on a spread sheet, track them over time. These are some things I know about my St. Ambrose web site, Best Information on the Net.
- It went from a high of 30,000 hits in May of 1997, to a high of 65,000 hits in March of 1998, to a high of 99,000 hits in April, 1999.
- I know that the usage pattern follows the academic year, rising to peaks of activity in November and April, so I know that it is serving a college and school audience.
- I know which pages are the most heavily used and which are the least used.
- When we add new pages, we can see whether people have found them and used them.
My statistics package on Marylaine.com also allows me to track daily and hourly hits, so I can detect usage patterns, which days and time of day you're visiting these pages. It also tells me where my visitors are coming from, which is how I know I have readers in Australia and New Zealand. It tells me that Neat New Stuff I Found This Week, which had a built-in audience, continues to be my most popular page, followed by ExLibris and BookBytes.
Couple this information with statistics about who is linking your pages in--both HotBot and AltaVista allow you to search by your URL to find out who is doing this. This is how I know BIOTN is linked in by 250 K-12 schools, and by over 500 colleges and community colleges, which means it is seen on a regular basis by our university's prime recruiting targets--proof to my administration that is should be regarded as a prime marketing tool the university can and should make use of. I know that it is linked in in over 40 countries (I have seen descriptions of it in 2 languages I can read, and 17 I can't), and is required use in over 130 college courses throughout the United States.
All this data gives us and our site credibility with our own faculty and administration. The data is especially important when you are talking about the internet, a medium that many senior administrators may not understand very well. (One of the problems for faculty doing work on the internet, for instance, is that the people who evaluate them for tenure are not familiar with scholarship on the internet and have no idea how to compare this work with other forms of publication.)
The statistics offer external validation, proof that we're doing something right. I suspect that it's that kind of statistical evidence that was responsible for turning Carole Leita's wonderful iindividual achievement, the Berkeley Public Library page, into the state-funded, collaborative project, Librarians' Index to the Internet.
You could go and do likewise.
