If you provide an online library of educational resources, such as publications, videos, presentations slides and links, I can help your library’s visitors find the useful stuff more easily.
Review and planning
It’s common for resource libraries to go awry over time. Changes in organisational direction, ways of working and staff can all have an impact on how well a library is maintained and developed, and consequently how easily it is to find resources.
If your library has got out of sorts, I can carry out a systematic review of its content, usage and functionality, covering:
- Relevance, age and scope of the resources
- Quality of information describing resources and making them searchable
- How well the search facility and other search aids work
- How the library is used, based on search analytics
- How easy the library is to edit and maintain
The review includes proposals for change, staff guidance and a plan of work.
I can also help you set up a resource library from scratch.
Categories, tags and other stuff
The pieces of information used to describe a resource (e.g. title, description, keywords, categories, tags) are called metadata. They all play a role in helping your library’s users find what they’re looking for, and discover more of what’s there.
The title, description and keywords are all food for the library’s search function, and are particularly important for audio-visual resources and other media which can’t be indexed without them.
Categories and tags are useful tools for helping users get a feel for what’s in your library and to find resources. Depending on how the library has been designed, they may be used to help narrow down search results, to create lists of similar resources, and as part of the information describing a resource.
So, it’s important to choose words used for these carefully. I can help with this by working out category and tag sets, and writing guidelines for staff and volunteers adding resources to the library.