Library à la Carte beta
Library meet Open-Source: Library à la Carte
Why Course Assignment Pages?
Oregon State University librarians confirmed in a needs assessment that undergraduates are very assignment-driven. Students, confused by the complexity and organization of information, avoid library resources. To help students more easily access quality library information, we developed the Interactive Course Assignment web pages (ICAPs). ICAPs highlight relevant library resources for a particular class or research assignment.
ICAPs are dynamic web pages that integrate Web 2.0 features, chat and RSS feeds, etc. with traditional library content, such as catalogs and article databases. Using these pages, students quickly locate research tools and information.
How can a group of librarians, who have full-time responsibilities and varied technical expertise, create engaging course-centric web pages to meet the needs of 19,000 students? OSU Libraries decided to develop Library à la Carte, which enables librarians to easily create, manage, and publish ICAPs.
Library à la Carte goals, requirements, implementation, and assessment center on the two major user groups: students and librarians. An additional stakeholder group is the instructors with whom librarians collaborate on course assignment help.
Project Goals
Library à la Carte: Students
- Discover quality resources for coursework
- Save student time
- Easily accessible
- Focused on class assignments
- Help students produce better research products
- Incorporate Web 2.0 features that will engage students
- Connect students with librarians and library resources
Library à la Carte: Librarians
- Save time creating and maintaining ICAPs
- Enable librarians to add Web 2.0 features to ICAPs
- Easily share and reuse content
- Establish a consistent look and feel with the library web site
- Ensure web and accessibility standards
- Build capacity for librarians to learn new technical skills
- Promote library support to course instructors
Project Overview
ICAPs: Course-Centric Web Pages
- 2005: Needs Assessment
- Spring '06: HTML templates developed based on user studies
- Positive student and faculty feedback affirmed project direction
- Lack of scalability of the HTML templates, plus other unmet goals drove the decision to build a tool.
- Fall '06: ICAPs generated by the ICAP tool used. Based on feedback, some redesign and additional features added in Su '07.
- Current release Fall '07: over 50 ICAPs created and used in classes.
- Ongoing assessment in the form of online surveys and statistics analysis.
Library à la Carte: Web 2.0 Publishing Tool
- Fall '06: Based on use-case scenarios and requirements, decided on custom solution. Tool requirements were:
- Easily create, edit, copy, and share ICAPs.
- Add and reuse modules for text, images, RSS, widgets, chats, and search boxes.
- Ability to notify instructors of pages and publish and archive pages.
- Provide layout selections.
- Dec '06: Paper prototype of tool tested with librarians. Feb '07: Functional Prototype tested with librarians
- Spring '06: Soft release of Library à la Carte built with Ruby on Rails.
- Current Release Fall '07: Based on librarian feedback, features added that greatly increased acceptance and use of the tool.
- Ongoing assessment and analysis in the form of forums, feedback and user testing.
Oregon State University Libraries
Oregon State University (OSU) Libraries'
three branches serve over 19,000 students.
OSU Librarians developed Library à la Carte in response to a 2005 needs assessment which explored better ways to serve OSU students.
Project Contacts
Project Leader: Margaret Mellinger
Engineering Librarian. OSU Libraries Web Team Member.
Contact Info
Project Member: Jane Nichols
Social Science/Humanities Librarian. OSU Libraries Usability Team Leader.
Contact Info
Technical Geek: Kim Griggs
Programmer, Analyst, Designer & Chef.
Contact