My thanks to the wonderful folks at Confab Central for the opportunity to present my lightning talk “Your Website is a Verb: Persuading Librarians to Let Go.” For anyone who might be interested in looking into the topic a little further, here are a few readings I’ve found particularly enlightening.
Confabber Hilary Marsh has some slides on Content Strategy for Library Websites which help outline the specific problems we face in this environment.
Amanda Costello’s Confab 2013 presentation “I Don’t Have Your Ph.D.: Working with Faculty & the Web” was important in shaping my thoughts about working with librarians, who are a lot like teaching faculty; I’ve used several of her tips with success.
Aaron Schmidt maintains (correctly, I believe) that Library Websites Should Be Smaller. And in “Give Them What They Want,” he also looks at what might happen if the library website disappeared (noooooooo!) and what that tells us about our users’ needs. The latter article is more relevant to public library sites than to academic/research libraries, but it’s a useful perspective nonetheless.
Rebecca Blakiston at the University of Arizona has a very good article on Developing a Content Strategy for an Academic Library Website. If you’re not affiliated with a library that subscribes to the journal this is published in, see if you can get it via Interlibrary Loan or something. (IU folks, you should be able to access the article.)
I mentioned briefly (heck, everything was brief, that’s the whole point of a lightning talk) that one of the special problems libraries face is our plethora of subscription-based vendor-provided resources, with their dizzying multitude of different interfaces and options. This strays beyond content strategy a bit, but this article from the Chronicle of Higher Ed talks about discovery tools – one of the big guns we drag out in an attempt to tackle this problem. It also features IU’s own assessment librarian (go Andrew!). As Researchers Turn to Google, Libraries Navigate the Messy World of Discovery Tools.
Finally, I keep coming back to good old Ranganathan and his Five Laws of Library Science – especially “Save the time of the reader.” Claire Rasmussen wrote a fantastic post on the Brain Traffic blog a couple of years ago that literally had me bouncing up and down in my seat with how nicely it ties together the basic principles of librarianship and those of content strategy. Plus, best title ever: Do It Like a Librarian: Ranganathan for Content Strategists.
how not to do it! photo credit – flickr/ jessica
You can find the slides from my lightning talk at https://iu.box.com/webverb.
Update: Slides are also available on Slideshare – http://www.slideshare.net/annehaines/your-website-is-a-verb-persuading-librarians-to-let-go
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