Library Brand Names
September 6th, 2006 by Christopher HarrisJohn walks into your library looking for a book on southern grey flying squirrels for his animal report. No problem, you think – I can handle this. After gently explaining that you don’t happen to have a book called The Southern Grey Flying Squirrel, you go into information location mode and think about your possibilities (in no particular order): you could look it up in World Book Encyclopedia, or maybe log into one of your EBSCO databases, what about checking H. W. Wilson’s Readers’ Guide, perhaps even a search on Google?
Wait a second, are we looking for information or playing library brand name bingo? That was the question that we were tackling at the end of last week as we took a final look at version 1.0 of our system’s resource portal. Who, besides the librarians and the companies care whether a database is provided by EBSCO or Gale?
David Warlick explored this concept a while ago, in a series of posts looking at source of information versus the value of information [Follow-up: 1 2 3 4]. I thought I got what he meant then, but now I am seeing it in a new light. Is it better for our students to label and link to a database as being EBSCO or NoodleTools or is it better to provide a more descriptive link that defines a situation in which the end result of the link would be helpful? What would happen if we had links to Animals, Bibliography Creator, Magazine Articles and other tool descriptions? In other words, are we going to highlight the source or the value of the information in our link text?
I know that libraries and librarians have traditionally placed a premium on the source of information. This isn’t a bad thing – one of the most important jobs for a librarian is collection development. Selecting proper sources to meet audience needs is a professional task. But is it a front-of-the-house or a back-of-the-house element? Collection development practices and purchasing recommendations should recognize the source and ensure that it is a trusted brand with proven expertise in the area, but does that brand name need to go beyond the purchase order? Will our users be impressed by, alter usage patterns of, or more highly respect a named source? In some cases, yes. In K-12, I am not so sure. It could maybe be stated that high school students need to become familiar with the brand names as that is the common usage pattern for higher education, but I am still unsure if that is a good thing or not.
In the end, I think we are going to play around with descriptive naming for resources on our portal and see what we get for user feedback. I will let you know how it goes…
Disclaimer: There are rather a lot of trademarked names thrown about in this post. You know they aren’t mine, and I am just referring to them. My not wanting to use a certain trademarked name is not an attack on the company; it is just a result of user-centered design.
September 7th, 2006 at 8:28 am
Brilliant!
Better said than I ever could have…
– dave –
September 8th, 2006 at 3:32 am
I will be very interested to see how the descriptive terms work. The more databases we subscribe to, the more difficult it is for our students to chose the best resource for their information problem. I try to promte the link on my website to “databases by subject area” but I’m afraid that when students look at my databases page (with all the seperate passwords and logins) they will think Google is just easier.
September 8th, 2006 at 12:00 pm
The overwhelming logins is the other problem we are working on, Leslie. Our hope is to have all of our database offerings using pre-authenticated access methods with a single sign-in through the portal.
August 13th, 2007 at 6:45 pm
We’ve been working this summer on this very problem – trying to make our language more user-friendly, instead of library-ese. Our thinking has evolved over the past few years. The first step was to try and implement a federated search of our databases, so kids wouldn’t HAVE to know which one to use when – they could search them all at the same time. Unfortunately, the federated search that we selected wasn’t quite there yet. We’re still searching for that perfect solution, but in the meantime, we are trying the natural language by asking “What Are You Looking For?” Hopefully by answering this question kids will be able to intelligently select the tool they need to use. If you want to see an example of our search page, take a look at http://www.mesquiteisd.org/library/phs/search.html
September 18th, 2009 at 9:10 am
Our hope is to have all of our database offerings using pre-authenticated access methods with a single sign-in through the portal.