Tomorrow you'll see a slight change to the production version of the SFX services menu (Get It menu). At Dale's suggestion (and with a bit of his assistance) I've added the K-State Libraries logo to the menu footer. Why? Let's thank Karen Calhoun.
Last Thursday, a group of K-State Libraries people, including me, attended a day-long presentation by Ms. Calhoun at KU Libraries. Karen's work for a number of years has been preparing technical services to accept and thrive in a user-centric, rather than a library-centric, environment. Her current position as OCLC's Vice President for WorldCat and Metadata Services gives her message a lot of leverage.
One of Karen's points about a user-centric world is that we as libraries can no longer expect the user to come to us. Instead, we need to put our stuff where the users are. We know this, and to some extent we've been doing it for a while now. For this blog's purposes, one of the best ways we get our stuff out there is through SFX. Think about it. A user can search a topic in Google Scholar, find interesting content, click the Get It button (assuming their GS preferences are set appropriately), be authenticated if they're off-campus, and link to an article they want without ever touching the Libraries' Web pages. Whether we think that's a good or appropriate research pathway doesn't matter. It exists, and we are capable of presenting our users with content we license for them at search points they're already using.
Going where our users are is one thing we already do, at least where SFX is concerned. Letting them know it's us is quite another. After the meeting, Dale pointed out to me that the services menu in no way indicates that Get It is provided by K-State Libraries. Sure, it's purple. It has a Powercat. Its branding says "K-State" all over the place. What it doesn't say is "K-State Libraries". Our users easily could be crediting the wrong part of the university for services that we work hard to provide. Oops.
As of tomorrow morning, that oversight will be fixed via the addition of the Libraries' logo to the bottom of the menu. If you're reading this from K-State, let me know what you think. If you're reading this from elsewhere, go check your own services menu. I've noticed that many other institutions use some version of their logo or name in the menu header or footer; if you do, you've got nothing to worry about. In the case of our somewhat abstract Get It logo, we needed a little extra help to send the message that Get It = K-State Libraries.
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