2007FallQ2Response

2. Facilitating intellectual and physical access to resources is important to information professionals. Nevertheless, sometimes information organizations establish physical, cultural or technical rules, procedures or standards that may become barriers that prevent or constrain information access by the communities they serve. Selecting a specific context or environment,


 * Discuss three concrete examples of these barriers
 * Explain why they are barriers in your selected environment
 * Propose solutions to at least one of the identified barriers

Jody: context: the UT library web presence. One barrier is the complexity of the website. Users do not know where to begin to search. Should they choose a database? If so, which one? Should they choose E-journals? Which one? Kudzu? Metasearch? The catalog? Users are confused, and this is a barrier to access. One solution is to develop/implement a single search box over all holdings and webpages, which is fed by keywords selected by metadata librarians to identify related holdings. By entering in a single term (example: "civil war") the user would be directed to the pertinent databases, journals, digital library materials, books and other holdings. A second barrier is that the site is not usable from a hand-held browser. As a tremendous number of students now use hand-held browsers for much of their information-seeking, this is a barrier. Clearly, redesign of the web pages and database accesses to support tiny displays is necessary. A third barrier is that the contents of our databases are effectively hidden from web search engines, though most of our clients go to Google first for their information. We need to find ways to provide our information to web agents and search engines, so that our users can find us in the places they search.

Meghan: Environment: University Archives/Special Collections Although many speccol departments are open to the general public, unlike the academic libraries to which they are attached, there are a few barriers to information access – some physical and some psychological.

1.Closed stacks 2.On-site use only 3.Cultural – low visibility

Closed stacks are generally for the safety of the materials. Archives and speccol consist of rare and old materials, and these need special environments for preservation. Finding aids (browseable, descriptive lists of contents) are available in the reading room and often online, but the actual contents must be requested and retrieved by a librarian. Solution – accompanied browsing for serendipitous information access (drawback: librarian/staff time), more descriptive finding aids (EADS), online finding aids and collections (restrictions: health of collections and copyright concerns)

On-site use only: see above. Also, there's a psychological aspect to this – monitored use, no personal possessions allowed in reading room, etc. This is for well-being of collections, but can be a scary research environment for the novice, which leads to ...

Cultural barriers include low visibility and special access restrictions that create an environment that is not relaxing and can be stressful for new researchers. Friendly staff and explanation of expectations and procedures posted online can be helpful at educating users re: reasons behind restrictions as well as give them an idea of what to expect. Low visibility is typically because the collections are not heavily sought-after by general university population, so marketing isn't terribly priority for archive librarians. Also, high traffic would be threatening to many archivists, and some materials should not be overhandled. Working with undergraduate classes re: primary source documents (special IL session for a history class, for example) could help with cultural barriers. So would online collections, displays in the main library building and around campus (museum-ish), even outreach at local public library or high schools (program to a local history club at the archive? presentation at public library or to senior high school history class?).