I’ve been shocked by how many errors I’ve been finding during these reviews of Scottish university library websites. Doesn’t anyone check that basic hyperlinks from the main library pages work? The worst one, so far, has been the LibrarySearch at Napier. The ‘Find subject guides’ link still doesn’t work today, and I’ve just noticed that the ‘Library on student portal’ link fails today as well.
The University of the West of Scotland home page loads fine on my tablet and phone, but on my two laptops with different operating systems it displays with a slightly cut-off graphic about the library on the right-hand side:
I know it’s only a missing ‘s’, but why does this happen? Maybe I should be applauding the fact that there’s both a link to the library, and another one to library e-Resource(s).
We’ve seen with other university library websites that there’s sometimes advice on current awareness in subject guides. The UWS guides were particularly clearly written, but had nothing about keeping currrent. I then checked the Information for researchers guide, but again found nothing. The A-Z list of databases includes Zetoc, but not JournalTOCs. The website is quite wordy, databases and services appear in various lists, but often there’s no indication about what these databases contain.
I can’t help but wonder whether, for example, ‘Springerlink Off-campus‘ without an explanation of content, will mean much to the average researcher, but it doesn’t really matter anyway, because the link didn’t work when I tried it.
So, nothing that I can find at the UWS Library website about keeping current, and one or two problems with the website.