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By adopting a guided approach to the Internet, we were able to streamline our Web links and better serve our patrons.
For many customers, finding good research can be like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. When Kansas City Public Library's Web team had an opportunity to redesign our site, we tried to shake all the needles out.
When our board wanted to spruce up the library's logo, we decided to redesign the Web site to match the new look. The Web team examined the long list of subject-arranged Web links to see how customers were searching. What we found was that a lot of hours were being spent where there was little customer interest.
Little Boy Blue Come Blow Your Horn
In the nursery rhyme, Little Boy Blue needs to toot his horn to call in all the animals from various places. In that same vein, our first task was to study Web link statistics to determine where our customers were most frequently clicking to call in information.
When we first looked at the statistics, we had more than 2,700 Web links arranged in subject directories under headings like "Arts & Entertainment" or "Business & Economy." Under those broad headings were narrower categories like "Business Calculators." This trail of narrower subject listings eventually led to a list of links, complete with summaries. Links to our subscription databases were also included.
Thankfully, the previous version of our Web link pages had been created in a database-driven format, and we had added a "counter" field in the database that kept track of how many times a link was clicked. We examined those statistics for a 12-month period to track link usage. Here's what we found. Our most popular Web link, ProQuest, was clicked an average of 1,348 times each month. The next most-popular 25 links were either local Web sites or one of our other subscription databases.
After the 50th-most-popular link, usage dropped off considerably. These links were hit an average of 50 times each month. Approximately 456 links were hit 10 or fewer times. Out of 2,700 links, a majority of them (2,200) were hit only 11 to 49 times each month.
We concluded that our current subject-based Web links were not...