Review of Scottish university library websites: Summary and ranking

In the past few days I’ve written seven blog posts reviewing what I found when I visited each of the Scottish university library websites in turn, looking for information or advice on keeping currrent.

Overall, standards have been IMHO very poor, with numerous broken links found in the short time I spent looking at these websites, faults with search engines, and very little quality advice about keeping up-to-date.

I now want to rank the websites, giving points for various things.

1 point if the various search services worked without problems.
1 point if the various search services were clearly labelled so that you know what you’re searching.
1 point if I didn’t find any 404s or broken links.
1 point if the site mentioned Zetoc.
1 point if the site mentioned JournalTOCs.
1 point if there was consistency (i.e. in terminology, or if one subject guide mentioned keeping current, then most others should as well)
1 point if I found any reasonably good advice on keeping current.
1 point if there was a current awareness service (that was not full of errors).

Looking through that list of eight pretty basic things, one would surely hope that a university library would at least score 7.

The scores.

Abertay University Library: 1 point (consistency (albeit consistently no mentions of keeping current, etc)).

University of St Andrews Library: 1 point (labelled search engines).

University of the Highlands and Islands: 1 point (mention of Zetoc).

University of Dundee Library & Learning Centre: 2 points (no 404s found, mention of Zetoc).

Queen Margaret University Library Services: 2 points (mention of Zetoc, mention of JournalTOCs).

University of the West of Scotland Library: 2 points (searches work OK, mention of Zetoc).

University of Aberdeen Library: 3 points (searches work OK, no 404s found, mention of Zetoc).

University of Glasgow Library: 3 points  (labelled search engines, no 404s found, mention of Zetoc).

University of Edinburgh Library & Museum services: 4 points (searches work OK, labelled search engines, no 404s found, mention of Zetoc).

Robert Gordon University Library: 4 points (searches work OK, no 404s found, mention of Zetoc, mention of JournalTOCs)

University of Strathclyde Library: 4 points (no 404s found, mention of Zetoc, mention of JournalTOCs, advice on keeping current).

Edinburgh Napier University Library: 4 points (labelled search engines, mention of Zetoc, mention of JournalTOCs, advice on keeping current).

Glasgow Caledonian University: 5 points (labelled search engines, no 404s found, mention of Zetoc, mention of JournalTOCs, advice on keeping current).

Heriot-Watt University Information Services: 6 points (searches work OK, labelled search engines, no 404s found, mention of Zetoc, mention of JournalTOCs, advice on keeping current).

University of Stirling Information Services: 6 points (searches work OK, labelled search engines, no 404s found, mention of Zetoc, mention of JournalTOCs, advice on keeping current).

At least they all avoided ‘nil points’.  Heriot-Watt and Stirling came out best.  Both Heriot-Watt and Stirling didn’t score points for consistency or having an actual current awareness service, so no library reached my reasonable expectation of 7 points.

If I’ve made any errors in the above or in any of the reviews, please let me know.