Web Advisory Group

Evaluating Web Sites of Other Libraries

Web Advisory Group has chosen some (mostly) ARL library web sites to study for this project. We tried to pick institutions that are at least somewhat like MIT, either in size or type of instituion. Our goal is to collect information that will help us in designing our new web site. Each person on our team has chosen 2 or 3 sites to evaluate. We will report our results to each other at the next web advisory group meeting on March 24.

Libraries Chosen:

Wayne Jones:

• California Institute of Technology
• Univ. of Toronto

Stephanie Hartmann:

• Indiana University
• North Carolina State Univ.
• Virginia Tech

Nicole Hennig:

• Georgia Institute of Technology
• Univ. of Pennsylvania

Pat Flanagan:

• Univ. of Michigan
• Stanford Univ.

Marlene Manoff:

• Univ. of British Columbia
• Univ. of California, Irvine

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Criteria for Evaluation

1. What is the overall structure of the site? How are departmental library pages integrated with information about the library system as a whole?

2. What are the names of the broad categories on the home page?

3. What are the names used for links that most libraries have?
examples: services, policies, hours, reference, interlibrary borrowing, etc.

4. How do they organize links to commercial databases, external web resources, and e-journals?

5. What interactive features do they have available? (forms, etc.)

6. How are images used in the site? Do they use mostly text links, or lots of icons? Are there photographs? Is there a separate "text-only" site?

7. How does the site look using Lynx?

8. How are special collections integrated with the site? -- such as digital archives or photo or art collections?

9. Are there any special features or content that you haven't seen before on most library sites?

10. What is not included on the site, that most libraries choose to include?

11. What is your subjective opinion of the aesthetics of the site?

12. What is your opinion of the overall usability of the site?

If you like, use a few of Jakob Nielsen's "heuristics" for evaluating web site usability: (see http://webreview.com/wr/pub/97/10/10/usability/sidebar.html for more info)

• visibility of system status (clear navigation bars: "where am I and where can I go next")
• speak the user's language with words familiar to the user
• consistency: use wording in your content and buttons consistently

14. How is the library linked to from the univerisity's home page? Directly, or down a few levels?

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