SOFTWARE REVIEW

Western Kentucky University Libraries and Museum (WKU Libraries) recently debuted a new web-based service, the “Topper InfoPortal” (TIP) at www.wku.edu/Library/tip. TIP was designed to help Western’s constituents, along with users in general, to streamline their searches for useful information to facilitate their academic and daily life.

There have been studies calling for libraries to create “portals of choice” and over sixty percent of librarians think that they have the resources to do so. (Study appeared in the March 2000 issue of the Journal of Academic Librarianship.) In fact, many efforts have already been made by libraries to create web directories. The uniqueness of TIP, however, lies in its integration of all library and other resources — funded and non-funded — into a one-stop access point, dramatically cutting down users’ time in locating their needed information.

As the illustration shows, TIP has three components.

1. The “search” function — accessible by the three buttons on top of the text area. The first button leads to Western Kentucky University’s online catalog and databases. The next leads to the Kentucky Commonwealth Virtual Library’s nine public academic institutions’ online catalogs and over thirty databases via the WebZ interface. The last button takes users to major Internet search engines followed by many others categorized by type.
2. The “Our Picks” — accessible from the vertical menu bar on the left of the screen. They consist of thirty-three categories such as “Financial Aid & Scholarships,” “Grants & Funding,” and “Computing & the Web.” Each category has about fifteen web links to sites professionally selected by the WKU Libraries Web Site Team, and is grouped into “local/regional” and “national/international” blocks, one on top of the other, prominently featuring the university’s resources drawn from its web sites. For instance, WKU students who look for job opportunities will first find the university’s Career Center, followed by links to nationwide job databases, Occupational Outlook Handbook, interview tips, etc.
3. “Other Library resources” – They include a series of search engines that search the portal, as well as the University’s and the Libraries’ web sites. In addition, at the bottom of each of the TIP pages, there are drop-down menus that take users to “Departmental Research Guides” or “pathfinders,” created by the WKU library faculty in collaboration with faculty from all WKU’s academic colleges.

Conceived by Dr. Michael Binder, Dean of WKU Libraries, TIP is built upon many successes and provides offerings that both include and exceed what commercial Internet Service Providers can offer. Although the online databases are only available to users affiliated one way or another with WKU and KCVL, many other resources, including the online catalogs are free. Above all, the concept of TIP can be used as a model by all libraries having funded database resources and online catalogs to significantly improve their web-based services.

Haiwang Yuan, Assistant Professor and Web Site & Virtual Library Coordinator, Western Kentucky University Libraries & Museum, 1 Big Red Way, Bowling Green, KY.

LIRT News, June 2000. Volume 22, number 4.
To report problems, please contact the LIRT News Production editor at jronan@ufl.edu

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