#Oncourse indiana university full#

The Libraries are about to get out of the e-reserves business when students access their class readings via Oncourse, will they have any kind of context for understanding these readings within the information landscape of their discipline, as they might if they encountered them via the library website? Will they have the perspective to understand the difference between a journal article and, say, a random blog post about the topic of their paper? Of course, if students are using Oncourse regularly, our goal of making services and information available at the point of need means that we need to have a presence there. We may need to “think outside the box” with regards to our parking woes…Īnother big landscape change is students’ increasing reliance on e-texts and Oncourse, IU’s course management system.

And of course, our information on parking – offered within the “Visitors” section of our website, targeted primarily to non-IUB-affiliated library users – should probably be updated.

The University of Houston libraries have a nice hours module on their site which accommodates a variety of locations and exceptions we plan to implement something similar.

reference assistance) aren’t available at that time. Nobody wants to come to the library only to find out that it’s not open, or that the particular services they’re looking for (e.g.

Information on library hours also needs to be clear, up-to-date, and prominent on the site.

Currently, some of this information is difficult to find or unavailable on our site. If it happens inside the library, it’s perfectly reasonable for them to look for information about it on the library website. But library users shouldn’t need to know whether something is managed by the Libraries or by somebody else. Because some of our services are not actually managed by the Libraries but by our partners, such as UITS and RPS, it may be challenging to keep this information up-to-date. “Do you have a public fax machine?” and “What time does the cafe close?” are common questions at the reference desk. It will be even more important for us to offer easily findable, clear, correct, and up-to-date information about the on-site services we offer.

“Save the time of the Reader” is one of Ranganathan’s principles of librarianship, and it’s as true as ever people don’t want to go through the hassle of getting here if they’re afraid their time might be wasted.

(How else can we help our website users connect with their research community? Definitely something I’d like to explore going forward.) But chat reference, along with email and phone-call options, can go a long way towards helping researchers find the resources and information that they need and, perhaps most importantly, helping them feel that they are not stranded and alone in the midst of their work. Sometimes, it’s true, nothing can replace an in-person reference interview. Our “Ask a Librarian” services may become even more important.How does this affect the library website? Some thoughts: Will people be less likely to visit the library if they cannot park nearby? We can’t say for certain, but it seems likely.

I know that when I have a late shift on the reference desk and leave shortly after 9 pm, there is usually someone anxiously waiting to take my parking place as I pull out and several cars circling the lot in hopes of an opening. But the impending loss of most of our on-site parking may make it more difficult for some of our patrons to visit us.

#Oncourse indiana university full#

If students and faculty wanted to access this information, we assumed they would find it easiest to come to the library website and start there.īut things have changed, and continue to change. The Wells Library building is, as it has been for years, a hub of activity for students stroll through the Information Commons at 9 pm on a Monday night and you’ll find that it is very lively, full of students working in groups and individually. Also, we thought of the library website as the place where our subscription resources “lived,” along with some locally-created content such as pathfinders and research guides. When our current site was designed and implemented, we thought of the website as more or less an adjunct to the library’s physical facility of course people used the website when they were not in the library, and were able to get a good deal of research done without visiting the library, but we assumed that when students and faculty thought of “the library” they had a brick-and-mortar (well, limestone) building in mind. As we prepare to evaluate our web content in connection with our migration to a Drupal platform, it’s astonishing to realize how much the landscape has changed in just the past few years.