Academic Library Website Benchmarks, 2013 Edition

Book excerpt: This report looks closely at how academic libraries are re-shaping their websites. The study is based on a survey of 56 academic library web staffs with data broken out by size and type of academic institution and other criteria. The 160 page study gives exhaustive data about academic library preferences in areas such as use of mashups, library social media sites, website staff and budgets, role of the college and library IT staffs, governance of the website, content entry policies, relations with the college IT and web staff, branding issues, college web conformity issues, preferences in content management systems, programming and scripting, division of web staff time among various priorities, use of blogs, listservs, email newsletters, rss feeds and other communication vehicles, use of and plans for federated search, search box presentation strategy, and use of cascading style sheets. The study also covers ease of use issues for library staff focusing on how easy it is to perform certain website-related tasks such as entry of the same content to multiple site locations, ease of inserting and positioning videos, and ease of inserting tabular materials, among other tasks. Other issues covered include but are not limited to: use of freelancers and consultants, sources of advice, use of social bookmarking tools and much more.