ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

One-stop shopping for college rankings

The Education and Social Science Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign offers one-stop shopping for Web- based college ranking sites.

Found at http://www.libraiy.uiuc.edu/ edx/rankings.htm, the College and University Rankings page provides links to ranking services for various areas of higher education including undergraduate, graduate, business, law, and international programs. One can also find a linkfilled discourse concerning the ongoing controversy surrounding repu tation-based rankings and a lengthy bibliography on the topic.

The Rankings page tries to emphasize caution in the use of college ranking services and urges users to investigate the methodology of any service under consideration. Toward that end, a lengthy section dealing with the ongoing controversy over rankings is provided. The page’s cautionary section is a guide to some very interesting networked information on the college ranking process. Users will find this information helpful when trying to evaluate individual ranking services and when trying to decide how much weight rankings deserve in the college selection process.

The College and University Rankings page was created by the authors. It debuted in Octo- ber 1997 and gathered a small amount of hits during it first half year of existence. In March and April 1998, the page was submitted to vari- ous search engines including Alta Vista, North- ern Light, and InfoSeek. Following the site's listing in Yahoo! in May, its use skyrocketed. The page continues to grow in popularity and is now receiving between 25 and 30,000 hits per month.

Over 99% of the page’s usAers are from outside the immediate University of Illinois community and these users generate a steady stream of e-mail concerning rankings. In making special efforts to assist this new group of patrons, the librarians of the Education and Social Science Library discov- ered the power of the Web in reaching out to nontraditional users. Bringing some organiza- tion to a small comer of the Internet and serv- ing an entirely new audience have been two very satisfying outcomes made possible by the creation and maintenance of the College and University Rankings Page.—Daniel Burgard, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, dburgard@uiuc.edu; Stephanie R. Davis. University of Southern California, srdavis@usc.edu