Texas A&M University Libraries

http://library.tamu.edu

I will start off my review of library websites and OPACs on the class blog with the one I am most familiar with, the library at Texas A&M University, where I went to school as an undergrad, to use as a baseline for comparison with those of other libraries. The library’s website is somewhat bland and generic, and is in the process of being overhauled. Personally, on an aesthetic level I actually prefer the clean white look of the older sections of the website to the shades of gray and blue in the new sections. The site seems to be pretty standard. Some of the more special features are the Search Now box in the center of the home page and the Ask a Librarian feature, which includes chat capability.

One newly reworked section/feature is for searching E-Journals. Now, when you type your search query into the box, some of the results pop up directly under the text box and update as you type. This nifty feature allows you to preview the results on the fly and make sure that you are searching for want you actually want.

Another one of the reworked features, which I mentioned earlier, is Search Now, which allows users to search across the library’s holdings and the databases to which it has described in a single location. Since I am no longer with the university, my capabilities are limited to the library’s holdings. However, this looks like it may work better than it did when I attended and worked there and allow users to search for information more effectively. A potential problem, particularly for users who do not know which specific database they should search, is that you still have to select a set of databases in which to search. When I was there, I preferred to just go to the OPAC or database directly because it was less of a hassle that way, and I could get better results more quickly by going to the source.

LibCat, the library’s OPAC seems to be pretty standard. It certainly is not aesthetically pleasing. The OPAC can be somewhat difficult to use and definitely could be a problem for a non-university audience. That said, it offers search tools that can help you narrow down your search fairly well once you have figured out how to use them. The OPAC does offer a few features, including the complete MARC record, and icons by the search results listings showing what type of media and format it is. Overall, I found it to be very useful and I did not have many major problems with it, although that may be because I have not had much experience with OPACs and therefore do not have anything to compare it against. One problem that I do recall is that the keyword search did not work particularly well, so it was almost always more effective to search for titles and authors when known, or within the Library of Congress subject headings.