ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

Developing Web pages for professional communication

In 1996, the library at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, decided to make professional homepages for all of its librarians, and bring its collegial communication into the electronic age.

With the aid of the Tim Cole, Systems Librarian for Digital Projects, and his staff, the six librarians in the Academic Resident Librarian Program took on this project. The result was the Library Faculty Directory (http://www.library. uiuc.edu/faculty/).

The traditional means of communicating with onand off-campus colleagues for librarians at the university was a printed university library annual report. But the publication had a small circulation, going only to a select few in each department, and even that small amount of exposure ceased in the 1980s when the annual publication died.

With the absence of a current, all-inclusive source showing librarians’ professional activities, Robert Wedgeworth, then university librarian, wanted to develop such an online profile/bibliography for librarians that could do what the old paper annual reports could not: provide to colleagues onand off-campus a concisely visible and easily accessible index of publications by library faculty, and a description of the library faculty’s services. While the library maintains two wonderful resources, the “Library Faculty Research Interests Database” and the “Recent Library Faculty Publications Database,” the professional homepages provide the opportunity for direct access to each faculty member, and offer data on a person’s research in what is perhaps the first location in which colleagues would search for any information.

There are 116 library faculty pages, and, of these, more than 54% go beyond directory information and give a librarian’s professional duties, activities, and publications.

During a snapshot period of academic year 1997 though summer of 1998, the faculty pages received more than 32,000 hits. More than 48% of those hits were from campus, but more than 51% came from outside the university, including other states and countries.

We believe our Web pages have strengthened our librarians’ communication with the campus and with colleagues elsewhere, and we hope that other libraries will look at such projects for their librarians.—Nina C. Davis, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, caron@ninc.edu and Jean M. Dickinson, New Mexico State University, jedickin@lib.nmsu.edu