We’ve now launched a more streamlined way to let our users know about the options they have for online and print access to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, something that replaces the multiple links we used to offer on the Databases page and that now also provides instructions for how to read either paper in Factiva via the News Pages feature.
Instead of three listing on the Databases page for the New York Times pointing to three different links, we have one that points to a new LibGuide page. By removing the multiple listings on the Databases page, we’ve made things a little easier on the eye (and the attendant cognitive load) for the user. Similarily, we’ve gone from two listings for the Wall Steet Journal to one that goes to a dedicated LibGuide for that paper.
Each of these new LibGuide pages features:
- a box with links to the main online access options
- a box with info about where to find the print edition
- a box with screenshot instructions of how to get to the News Pages feature in Factiva and how to use it to select a section of the paper or a different issue of the paper
This project was begun after looking at the search logs in Summon (AKA Bearcat Search) and in the site search feature of the library website, both of which featured a very high number of queries for those newspapers by name. We already knew anecdotally from reference interactions that students commonly asked for help getting to those newspapers. By looking at the search logs of Summon and the site search we could see that a number of students were mistakenly going there to get to the newspapers instead of using the A-Z journal lookup feature from Serials Solutions that the “Journals” search feature connects to.
With the publication of these new guides, students will be more likely to get a usable hit in the site search feature on the site (because it indexes not just library web pages but also all of our LibGuides). If students search in Summon for “new york times” or “wall st journal,” they’ll now see a “Best Bet” search result for that points to the appropriate LibGuide page. Try these sample Summon searches to see how that works:
