IA exhorts us to think about how we present information. For example, on lib.usf.edu, we've made a number of good layout decisions. It's easy to find crucial information like hours and contact information, and we have a mostly well-organized set of hyperlinks in the body. But we've also made some questionable decisions. Why are links to Articles and E-Journals, which are information sources, in the same menu bar with links to ILL and Help, which are services? Why does the link labeled Books take us to the library catalog, which manifestly contains more than just books? Why do we redundantly link to the same pages under the heading Research Tools that we do in the menu bar, and why are the pages labeled differently in one place than in the other? These inconsistencies make it harder for users to build a mental model of the site. Other parts of the page seem to be designed for librarians rather than our colleagues in other fields whom we serve: What is the difference between a database and an e-journal? What is PRONTO? What is RefWorks? (For that matter, what is ILL?) Where will I go if I click on the Karst Information Portal? You won't find the answers to these questions without more clicking.
Anyway, my point is that our website's front page is not bad, but it could be better. The site doesn't do much to point a novice user in the right direction. Its flaws become transparent to veterans like ourselves, but there's a lot an experienced information architect could do to streamline and clarify it. We should *not* cop out by saying that instructors just don't give us the opportunity to teach students how to use the library. If our users can't figure out how to use our interface, the answer is not to ask our users to be more perfect, but to design our interface to be more humane.
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