Poster Abstract


Poster Abstract - New Orleans SC/MLA 2001 Meeting

Bits or Misses: Tracking Web-Based Instructional material
Justin Robertson and Sarah Murray
University of South Alabama, Biomedical Library, Mobile, AL

Purpose: This poster will detail the points of access of web-based instructional materials in order to determine their effective placement on the library web page.

Setting/participants: The USA Biomedical Library is a medium-sized health science library. With expanding distance education, the library's homepage provides outreach to students who don't have the same opportunity for face-to-face instruction as onsite users.

Methodology: We are creating instructional pages for the web. To find the most beneficial placement, we are creating duplicate pages and linking to them from different areas of the homepage. By examining the statistics, we hope to find out what sections of our homepage our users are accessing most often.

Results: This is an ongoing process to expand the homepage and determine the best access points to particular pages. We want to increase the interactive, self-instructional aspect of our homepage. The increased use of the Internet by distance education, traditional students, and faculty has cut down on the number of library visits. We hope these pages will supplement traditional library instruction for all users. As the homepage becomes an essential library tool we need to examine its use to improve design.

Evaluation Method: We will count the hits per page to tell us how patrons accessed the page.