From Theory to Practice: How School of Information Studies Classes Have Enhanced the Library Website at FSU College of Medicine by Applying Textbook Theory

Authors : Suzanne Nagy , Nadine Dexter , Barbara Shearer ; Medical Library, Florida State University

Purpose: This poster demonstrates how graduate Information Studies students at Florida State University have used fundamentals learned in class to contribute to enhancements of the architecture, design, and usability of the College of Medicine Library Website.

Setting: The Florida State University College of Medicine is a community-based medical school established in 2001 to educate the next generation of physicians, with a legislative mandate to serve minority, geriatric and other underserved populations in Florida . As the first academic medical library established since the Internet, the FSU CoM Medical Library has made delivery of full-text electronic books and journals both practical and preferred by faculty, students and staff. At the same time, new electronic resources and delivery methods are redefining the virtual library to include any digital information accessible from any laptop, personal data assistant (PDA) or workstation at any time and place needed. Therefore, remote access to current medical information is of the highest priority to the Medical Library, and the website as the portal to that information is essential for that access.

Brief description: In creating a new virtual library, the staff chose to take advantage of the resources of the FSU School of Information Studies by involving selected graduate classes in the design of the website. The first challenge was given to students in classes in Information Architecture classes. Many online resources do not fall into the traditional categories of print resources. Also, users of a virtual library come from different backgrounds than users of print libraries and they use the resources differently. The students were challenged to design a site architecture to meet these information needs. Next a class in Usability Analysis performed a systematic study of the site to determine how closely the chosen architecture was meeting user needs, and to recommend modifications for improvement.

Results/Outcome: The site was redesigned to reflect some of the ideas of the students based on principles taught in the class in information architecture. The results of the usability analysis revealed areas of strength and weakness of the implementation, enabling appropriate decision making for revision and enhancement. A process for recurring analysis and enhancement was identified to assure continued high quality and relevance of the site.