Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Library website critique

For this weeks blog post I chose our institution's library website. This was a logical choice for me having worked in the library for two years prior to my current position at the division E-Learning at the University of the Free State. While working at the library I had to help students navigate the webpage and the online repositories. Lets have a look at some screen shots of the pages and decide wether this library page is a repository or referactory site.




On this page we can see the resources available online. There is a search engine that looks like this:



The search paramaters are narrow but effective in findinhg what you want. As in the blog post (http://blog.ouseful.info/2009/08/10/open-educational-resources-and-the-university-library-website/) we find that there are no mention of teaching materials or open educational resources.

Next we have a look at the terms and conditions of use of content. These T & C are obviously influenced by copyright rules and as you can see limits you greatly in the use of the content.



Once one agrees to the T & C you are taken to a page where databases and online journals repositories are housed. This means that this specific library website is indeed a referactory site that guides users to learning repositories like EBSCO Host and the like.



In my opinion the website is satisfactory to the level of online and computer skills the average student on our campus posess. Looking out of a lecturer's point of view who needs to create course material it is a different story. The copyright restrictions placed on the materials found through this refractory site virtually prohibits lecturers from re-using the content in their course material.

1 comment:

  1. The copyright notice is quite different than you would see in Canada, hmm interesting. Nice work!

    ReplyDelete