Okay, my many readers (all 5 or so of you...), I have a favor to ask. At my library, we are trying to figure out the best word or phrase (must be pretty short - no longer than 3 words, preferably 2) to describe something on our library website.
So, let's say you come across the following page on a library website: It contains an alphabetical list of all the disciplines/areas of study on campus, from accounting to psychology to theatre. The name of each discipline is hyperlinked and takes you to a page that contains databases, reference books, journals, and web sites to use to do research in that specific discipline (so "Law" would take you to a list of databases, journals, websites, etc, specific to law and legal research).
What would you call these thingamajiggers?
The big push these days is to make things intuitive, for obvious reasons - if the users don't get what something means, they won't use it, or if they click on something and have an expectation of what they are going to find but it's something completely different, they get frustrated. No more library jargon!
So please post a comment with your suggestions/ideas! No librarians please. And I know many of you are thinking that you don't use the library, so you have no idea, but that's even better. This needs to be intuitive for all the students (most of the campus. sigh.) who do not use the library much, if at all.
3 comments:
Where I come from we would call that a "directory."
Stacy and Nye! - Thanks for your suggestions!
Stacy - Thank you for demonstrating why I don't want librarians to respond: We can't count! That exact title was debated back and forth at my library but eventually someone decided that 17 words > 3 words. A few are still not convinced, though. (Note: We also argued endlessly as to whether "database-related" should count as one word or two). :)
"Database Research Links" is the most commonsense description that pops in my mind...
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