A Digital Outrigger

For the past year I’ve been working on a project using Archive.org to categorize a sub-set of academic library home pages according to their browse and search structures. Next week I’ll present this data at ALA during the Monday 6/26 poster session at 1pm. But for now, here’s a quick overview of some of the findings. This is an update to the data presented last year (2006) at Internet Librarian.

Methodology: Using Archive.org and Google’s list of academic websites, I semi-randomly selected a group of websites (around 276) to see how their browse structure and search placement was organized. The goal was to analyze a group of libraries from a wide cross-section of resource-enabled entities in order to get an idea of how the library community is thinking about library website design. Here is how the various categories were broken down:

Browse strategies: (i.e. if there’s such a thing as “browse DNA”, what is it? I personally don’t have a preference between these two groupings.)

• Splash home pages: (i.e. the top page browse structure disappears once secondary pages are reached)
  • Grid: Home page links are grouped along an x:y axis
    • random example: http://library.csudh.edu/
  • Cascade: Links are grouped in a cascading structure either along the x or y axis
    • random example: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/
  • Radial: Links are grouped along the radius of a circle
    • random example: http://library.hartford.edu/

• Frame home pages: (i.e. the browse structure is persistent from the the top page to the secondary pages)
  • random example: http://www.ulib.niu.edu/

Search strategies: (i.e. how is search implemented from the home page?)

• None: search might be available, but it’s usually a text link
  • random example: http://lib.harvard.edu/
• Site-search: search box that searches the library site, but not catalog
  • random example: http://www.library.eku.edu/
• Catalog: search box that searches the catalog
  • random example: http://library.citytech.cuny.edu/
• Site/catalog: search box that searches either the site, catalog, database(s), or all of the above
  • random example: http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/

Browse Findings: (the “error” result indicates a problem with archive.org data)

When I started this, I expected to find the “grid” structure to be gaining in popularity. I was surprised to see that the idea of persistent framing is definitely a trend with legs. When grid, cascade, and radial are combined (as “splash”) the trend is still there, and still surprising:

Search Findings: Here’s the results for search placement on the home page. There’s a definite trend towards placing a one-stop search box directly on the top page, where patrons won’t have to click through to use:

Conclusion: The way things are going, if you’ve embarked upon a library site redesign you would have the most company if you adopted a persistent browse structure with a comprehensive search box located on the home page.

Data:

This library website analysis data [2007 Academic Library Website Analysis (spreadsheet)] is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

The same goes with all images above, as well as the original list of library websites found here.