Dan Ream and Jimmy Ghaphery. "VCU's 'My Library': Librarians Love
It....Users? Well, Maybe.."
Originally published in Information Technology and Libraries
19 (4) December (2000).
(Please note: web links were working when this was published in 2000, but no longer exist.)
Dan Ream
and
Jimmy Ghaphery
Virginia Commonwealth University's My Library project <http://www.library.vcu.edu/mylibrary> has chosen "ease of
My Library at Virginia Commonwealth University was, in part, the inadvertent result of a committee. In the spring and early summer of 1998 the library had undertaken a review and redesign of the library web site. The committee work was difficult and often revolved around limited web real estate on the front page. The committee completed its work and launched a new web site, but the limitations of a static web design for the wide variety of our users was apparent. Dan Ream, Head of Instruction at James Branch Cabell Library, had been exploring many of the emerging personalization tools on the Internet such as CRAYON <http://www.crayon.net/> and My Yahoo <http://my.yahoo.com>. In the summer of 1998, he proposed the idea of My Library as a potential solution to many of the frustrations with the web design process. In short, why not let the users create their own interface?
One of the most attractive outcomes of a user created interface is that the number of clicks to a variety of library databases and services could be minimized. No longer would the user need to follow one distinct path of several clicks to get to a specific database, then use a completely different pathway and set of clicks to get to another section of the library web site. All of the relevant library information would be on one page. Further, as the library web site inevitably shifts, the user's collection would remain the same location.
This was a compelling idea and also presented itself as an opportunity for Jimmy Ghaphery, Librarian for Instructional Technology, to learn additional web skills. Ghaphery started work on this with a strong knowledge of HTML and some experience with javascript. Upon consultation with the Instructional Development Center at the university it was determined that Perl would be a reasonable language for writing a My Library program. Ghaphery assembled the first versions of My Library by relying on a variety of freeware scripts and web sites devoted to Perl. By the middle of August, we had a working prototype of what we believed was the first implementation of My Library in an academic library. [1]
Even though it had been announced within the VCU Libraries, this rapid one month development was a bit of a surprise to the organization. In general, the project was greeted with support and a willingness to take the risk of launching such a new service. During the early Fall we announced My Library on various listservs (Web4Lib, BI-L, NetTrain, VIVA-L) and were able to test how it would respond to heavy traffic. More than 500 people from around the world logged into the My Library test site in the first week of October. In monitoring this activity we found no problems. Further, more than 60 people took the time to write us about the service. The Internet community of librarians and web trainers voiced enthusiasm for the service and the ease of use of the interface <http://www.library.vcu.edu/mylibrary/comments.html>. Some of the biggest concerns were alerting users to new databases, maintenance procedures, and requests for the Perl scripts. Upon this feedback we instituted a "what's new" button that appears on each user’s My Library page and developed a mechanism for sharing the code with others. On October 12, 1998, roughly three months after the initial idea, a new link appeared on the redesigned library homepage that said:
My Library
Create shortcuts to your favorite library resources
The architecture for VCU's My Library is very simple. All of the user passwords, logins, and e-mail addresses are stored in a single text file. Each user has a corresponding text file that lists his choices. A single Perl script is used to register users, generate My Library pages from the user's profile, and allow the user to edit his profile. My Library is running on an IBM RS/6000 AIX Unix server with 256MB of RAM memory.
In developing My Library, a primary consideration was ease of use. We strove to let users create a personal page by traveling through as few screens as possible. Further we allowed users to choose any login and password combination. A complicating factor for our users is that we use a proxy server to grant access to library databases from remote locations. The proxy service is not integrated into the My Library system which thus requires My Library users from off-campus to first login to their My Library page and then login to the proxy server for authenticated access to the library databases. While we have not yet reached the goal of a single login for all library services regardless of location, one of the first upgrades to the My Library system was to enable a cookies login so that users could automatically login to their My Library page.
Since the launch in the Fall of 1998 several improvements have been made to My Library. Most significantly, in the Spring of 1999, Ron Miller, Webmaster for the McKee Library at Southern Adventist University undertook a major rewrite of the My Library Perl Script. Miller greatly improved the script by segregating the database choices into a separate file. This has made the addition and deletion of database choices considerably easier and reduced the total file size of the script. Following Miller's changes a number of other features have been added including an automatic login option via cookie and a custom e-journal selection whereby users can select specific titles. The e-journal option was written to work in conjunction the libraries' electronic journal database which is powered by the commercial software, Cold Fusion.
By June of 1999, there were 1175 registered users for the My Library service. Of these 199 had not accessed their accounts within six months and were moved out of production and into an inactive area. In looking at the e-mail addresses, 93 accounts were from .edu addresses other than the VCU domain (guests testing the service who had wandered into the production database). More than half of the accounts, however, did have an identifiable VCU address (.vcu.edu). In the late summer a more obvious guest access link was instituted in an effort to steer guests away from the production database.
In the Fall of 1999, a full year after the initial release of My Library, a log file was added in an effort to better understand and measure the use of My Library. The log file was very simple, recording the unique username of the user, time and date of access, ip address, and the mode of access (login through password box, login through cookie, edit or creation of a page, or edit through the e-journal option). Analysis of the log file has yielded an interesting portrait of the typical My Library user.
Over a six month period, October 1999 through March 2000, there were 8,393 entries in the log file from 840 unique users. Logins to My Library accounted for 7,290 entries from 663 users and edits accounted for 1,017 entries for 581 users.
|
Number
of Return Visits
|
Number
of Users
(excluding
class accounts) |
Total
logins
(excluding
class accounts) |
|
1-3
|
312
|
479
|
|
4-10
|
186
|
1152
|
|
11-20
|
88
|
1274
|
|
More
than 21
|
58
|
2313
|
This pattern of disinterest by the majority of users is also seen when looking to the number of edits in the log file. There were 177 new accounts created during the six month period that were subsequently never visited. The option of creating a custom list of e-journals was only used by 42 users (5% of all active accounts). Thus, while we first believed that My Library would be an ideal solution for all of our students and faculty, it appears that only a small percentage have found it to be an enduring access point for their research. It is however encouraging how often this core group of users have taken advantage of My Library.
Other patterns in the log file were less surprising.Traffic into My Library peaked at predictable times in the middle of both semesters (November and February). A healthy percentage of use (30% or 2,523 accesses) came from off-campus through the library proxy server. 197 users accessed their My Library page via cookie for a total of 1,278 logins, whereas 466 users accessed their pages through entering a login and password accounting for the remaining 6,012 logins.
VCU's My Library, though first conceived as a tool for individual library users, has instead proven to be most popular as a library instruction tool. Popular first with the librarians, who can create a specific page for each class they teach in a few minutes with no html editing difficulties; and then popular later with the students and professors we teach , whose heavy use of these pages has proven time and time again that classes like coming back to a single page to find all the relevant resources for their research assignments. Between October, 1999 and March, 2000 there were 2072 logins through class accounts set up in library instruction sessions and 19 class accounts (for Business, Psychology, Education, and other disciplines) represent 28% of all logins, at an average of 106 logins for each class account. With class size averaging 22, that averages just under 5 uses per student per semester for these pages.
When used as a teaching tool, the layout of the My Library page somewhat shapes the instruction session.Students are introduced to My Library with the analogy of it being like their own shelf in the library where all their favorite resources can be found every day. Better still, this "shelf" is available almost anywhere they can access the web. Limitations to database access, such as at computers where proxies cannot be set (such as most public schools in our central Virginia area) are also explained and the process of proxy setting is shown. Though the ability to set a proxy is not necessary for creating a My Library page, it is essential for accessing the full-text (and other) databases themselves.Class instruction My Library pages usually use the class's course number (such as TEDU556: Table 2) as the login and the professor's last name as the password. These are given in a handout that also shows the URL of the login page itself <http://www.library.vcu.edu/mylibrary/>. No other handouts are then necessary for showing where resources can be found on the library's many web pages.
Next, bookmarks to up to six web sites chosen specifically for that class's research needs are briefly shown; followed by full-text databases, also found at the top left of our My Library pages.This nicely corresponds to the resources that students express the greatest interest in web resources and full-text databases. We often describe the latter resources as the "HBO" or "pay channels" of the Internet and thus try to get across their cost (to the library) and value (to the students) of these full-text journal resources. Instruction sessions then typically review the resources at the top right of the My Library page, such as the library catalog <http://exlibris.uls.vcu.edu:97/webpac-1.2-bin/wgbroker?new+access+top.notislms> and the Online Journal Search page <http://www.library.vcu.edu/ejournals/index.html>,which allows students to see if particular journals are found full-text in any of our full-text aggregator databases such as InfoTrac, Lexis/Nexis, or Dow Jones. In My Library this tool bears the label of "Where's That Journal?"
Further down the class's My Library page are other specific databases chosen for that class's research needs, such as ABI-Inform, ERIC, Social Work Abstracts or many others. Librarians may be tempted to include many databases for a class's potential needs, but students probably prefer fewer links, which makes for a cleaner My Library page with less likelihood of feeling overwhelmed.
Links to library services such as reference question, book renewal, interlibrary loan and document delivery web forms are also included on class pages, reminding the librarians to touch upon the availability of these services. The remote access proxy setting instructions are included at the My Library page bottom, bringing the class session (usually 50 or 75 minutes) full circle.
Faculty and student reception of the My Library instruction sessions has been extremely positive. In addition to the heavy usage of these pages described above, students' and faculty's comments about My Library have been very enthusiastic, such as e-mail received at the end of the last semester that said, "We especially liked the special "my library" page you created for us". Many of these library users will not create their own personal "My Library" pages, though they are invited to do so. We suspect that students see their needs changing from class to class and semester to semester and thus the content of their "My Library" page might be too fluid to stay valuable with frequent re-editing. The course-specific page, on the other hand, meets their immediate needs and therein lies its popularity.
Fast forward from the original inspiration of VCU’s My Library.It is the summer of 2000, two years later and we are starting another redesign of the library web pages. Our current challenge is how to integrate My Library into the other emerging personalization features throughout our library system.
Soon, our integrated library system will allow patrons to query their borrowing record. By the winter we will have an Interlibrary Loan system that will allow users to track the status of their loan requests. More and more vendors are offering personalized alerts services that the library is beginning to promote. Further, we have a new books alert service under development. Many of these emerging personalization features will more than likely carry unique user names and passwords. While the current My Library system at VCU is a simple way to create personal menus for researchers, it is neither robust or secure enough to bring these emerging features under its roof. Likewise, the other systems such as the patron borrowing record or the alert services do not have an open architecture or room to integrate with other services.
The goal is easy to articulate. A single login followed by secure links to my databases, borrowing record, management system for alerts, interlibrary loan, and remote authentication. Extrapolated out to the University level, I should also have access to my university e-mail, class or teaching schedule, and University events of interest to me. With such products as Campus Pipeline <http://www.campuspipeline.com/> and Blackboard <http://www.blackboard.com/> seeking to create University portals, much of the University personalization is in the foreseeable future on campuses across the country. Thus the pressure on libraries seeking to take advantage of personalization becomes both to integrate existing systems and to become represented at the University level. Such a wide point of access would steer My Library at VCU away from a power tool for the few and toward a primary point of access for all library users.
We must almost consider further the need for better marketing of this tool to its potential clientele. Although students in some classes have been required through library instruction to make their own personal My Library page, it is suspected that these users have not necessarily become regular users of this service.As we noted in our article title, librarians almost universally love the My Library concept, but not all library users do. Our perception is that only regular or frequent users of library resources would appreciate any value in a web shortcut to favorite resources, for they are the only users who have a sense of "favorites" among library tools to begin with. Class generated My Library pages may have proven popular because, for a least a short time, those students are frequent library users and have been introduced, through instruction to "favorite" resources.At the root of the marketing question lies the nature of library users and if they would value a time-saving device like My Library. One-time or infrequent library users would consider the creation of a My Library page an unnecessary impediment to getting their hands on the information they crave and no amount of marketing will likely lead these users to value a My Library product. Our challenge lies in reaching every frequent user of our library to make sure they are aware of this service and how to use it.
Table 2: Screenshot of example class page:
