Sunday, May 18, 2008

What to call the VRC

Aaron Schmidt wrote such an interesting post on his Walking Paper blog. When the Washington County library community was trying to decide what to call their databases, they asked their patrons. And the top choice was................“Online Resources." Yes, I know this doesn't mean paid resources, but apparently this is what patrons understand. Why didn't we think to ask them as we struggled with this issue?

As Aaron says in his posting "trying to come up with the right terminology for a library website isn’t easy, but it doesn’t have to be all guess work either. Asking even just a few people about a term is better than asking no one. This applies not only to labels on our websites, but also what to call our services. For more on usable library terms, see Library Terms That Users Understand."

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