It often seems like public libraries are leading the way with user-friendly websites. I think it’s too easy for academic librarians to say, “Well, it’s different for them: their users are kids and teenagers and the general public. Our<\/i> users are academically-inclined young adults who should be able to cope with learning the Proper Way of Doing Things.”<\/p>\n
The problem is the other difference between public library and academic library users: a public library user is a user for a lifetime. An academic library user (barring the few who go on to research and lecturing) is a user for, say, 3-5 years.<\/p>\n
Academic library users don’t have time<\/i> to learn how to do things the “Proper Way”. They’re too busy writing assignments and working to pay for their next electricity bill. And why should we<\/i> waste our time teaching them the “Proper Way” – only to have to teach the same lessons to the next year’s intake, and the next, and the next – when we could just fix our interface to let everyone get on with doing it the Easy Way?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It often seems like public libraries are leading the way with user-friendly websites. I think it’s too easy for academic librarians to say, “Well, it’s different for them: their users are kids and teenagers and the general public. Our users are academically-inclined young adults who should be able to cope with learning the Proper Way […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[73,131,28],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}