How Efficient are University Library Portals of NIRF Ranked Indian Universities

Abstract

Seeing the underlying value of having a unified interface to update users about library services and activities, most libraries have developed library portals. The paper aims to evaluate the contents and services of top ten NIRF ranked university library portals and score them in the classes of Excellent, Good, Average and Poor. Further, the study aims to investigate the most preferred type of content available on Indian university library portals. The top ten NIRF ranked university library portals were evaluated using a checklist based framework covering broad categories such as Information about general, information about the library’s physical collection, Information about subscribed e-resources, information regarding the library’s services, and Information regarding the use of social Web technologies. Findings suggest that six of the selected library portals were rated in the ‘Average’ class(scores 40-60 %), which shows that most of them lack essential user-oriented information. JNU’s library portal carries maximum information for their users scoring maximum University Score of 28(62.22 %). Among the selected library portals 49.23 per cent prominently provide information about the library’s collection, followed by general information(46 %) and information regarding library services(35.33 %). Only one portal exploits social networking features. The study report that the Indian university library portals suffer from issues like currency, transparency, visibility of collection, availability of online services, and uniformity. The findings of the study will help the portal development team to select the most common category of content describing information about services and facilities available on library portals. The existing portals can also improve their interface based on the findings of the present study. Assessment of existing university library portals of the national top ten university library portals in India is the first attempt to evaluate this kind of sample. The study’s value lies in its evaluation framework, that’s minimal in nature covering the minimum information categories that must be available on any university library portal.

Maximizing Coverage, Reducing Time: A Usability Evaluation Method for Web-Based Library Systems

“…In the context of usability, studies evaluate aspects including the link contact us, user commenting or feedback and providing help to the user through online tutorials, search screen help, guide through documentation and FAQs that encourage the user to work with the site. 12,[15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] . Navigation empowers the usability with the features including site map and table of content ?, 12,17,18,[20][21][22][23]25 .…”

“…The appearance and pleasant user interface is a critical aspect of user satisfaction 27,28,32 . Data credibility that provides complete, relevant and updated information about the organization under the category about us link is also important 12,15,17,18,20,[24][25][26]30 . Usability should be evaluated in terms of clear and understandable use of graphs, images, tables and diagrams with comprehensive viewpoint 15, 18 , 12, 17 .…”

“…The responsiveness of site with all browsers, its loading and downloading speed and accessibility with simple and responsive URL and error prevention helps in empowering usability 12,15,17,18,24,25,29,30,32 . Presenting the audience of the site, providing membership facility to the user, providing assistance via software tools like PDF, visitors count, ads free and other fun content contribute towards increased usability 12,17,22,23,26 . On the evaluation of specific usability aspects of library websites, studies highlight the importance of the copyright statement, bibliographical information of library content, separate display of new arrival and hyperlink to external resources, e-journals and open access resources 15,19,22,23,[26][27][28] .…”

“…Presenting the audience of the site, providing membership facility to the user, providing assistance via software tools like PDF, visitors count, ads free and other fun content contribute towards increased usability 12,17,22,23,26 . On the evaluation of specific usability aspects of library websites, studies highlight the importance of the copyright statement, bibliographical information of library content, separate display of new arrival and hyperlink to external resources, e-journals and open access resources 15,19,22,23,[26][27][28] . The suggested aspects such as ask a librarian and reference assistance is rated higher including the RSS feed, instant messages and virtual help features of blogging and discussion forums 15,[26][27][28][29] .…”

“…Display of search results with a poor organization, irrelevant ordering, grouping and prioritizing the results negatively effects the usability of the site 20,21,27,28 . The studies also specify the importance of recommendation of search results as per the number of hits on the library item or by the availability of the content, which helps the user to take quick results on their desired content 26,27 . Literature highlights that there does not exist an optimal set of usability evaluation aspects of WBLS in a single checklist that covers general as well as specific usability aspects.…”