Perhaps people would click on the links to them if they related to an action such as search encyclopedias, search newspaper articles. Anyhoo that was behind my reasoning to make the links for the Search from home: encyclopedias | newspaper & magazine articles.

Cheers, webgurl

I have a line on the front page with links that says, Search from home: encyclopedias | newspaper & magazine articles. I’ve found this works well.

I organise the online resources list according to rough subjects – Arts, Biographies, Encyclopedias & Dictionaries, Health,
History & Geography, Newspapers & magazines, Reading & Libraries,
Science & Technology, Other

Cheers, webgurl

For a snigglet idea, how about

e-search (a la e-mail?)

Subscription Reference Sources

Subscription eReferences

Online References

Online Subscription Sources

I like the idea of including the “subscription” piece so that students can distinguish these sources from sites on the free web.

I studied this for my MLIS research report and couldn’t find anyone in the literature who had, outside the context of website design. (In that context, people seemed mostly interested in changing to links like ‘Finding an article’ rather than renaming ‘database’ across the board.) A fair number of people had done tests on whether students understood that and other library jargon; a very small number of people (like, count them on one hand with fingers left over) had asked students what terms they’d use, but not for the word ‘database’.

I did a web survey of 50 students in New Zealand – non-scientific sample, but very interesting. I described a concept like (in this case) “A computer system you can use to find articles about your area of study is a:” and asked students to fill in the blank with the word they’d use. 25 gave a term consisting of or at least including ‘database’; 9 gave a term consisting of or including ‘catalogue; and 9 others gave some other answer, eg “research index”, “reference”, “course section”, “journal search engine”, “e journal”, “network”, “intranet”. I also got answers ranging from “blessing” through “piece of —-” (sic) and of course “??” and gaps (for various reasons I’d decided to allow non-answers).

(Some of the catalogue/database confusion went the other way too, with people saying ‘database’ for the system used to find books etc.)

I keep meaning to get my report into our digital library – oh, in the meantime I’ll at least put it up on my skeleton Google Pages site: skeleton library jargon page. The appendices include the questions and full results. Hours of entertainment.

If newspapers are using the term, it’s possible that people may gradually learn the term, for lack of a better one. I think the real issue for non-use is the general lack of federated searching to facilitate serendipitous discovery of the databases. After all, is it strange for patrons to expect an all-in-one search of all the library’s resources? Then, they wouldn’t have to know what they are called.

AND

“crap that your professor wants you to use so just do it already.”

See how I can work both sides of things?

When I first started teaching classes I would often get a completely blank stare from every single person in the class when I said the word Database and I would often need to spend a good chunk of time explaining what it was in general before we could even talk about when to use it.

I find that in the last year to 18 months there has been shift. I say Database and at least half the people know immediately what I mean and when you use one. We do a lot of marketing of our databases and we have lunch time sesions called DataBytes that help teach our customers how and when to to use them.

I am not sure if there is a better name… I think marketing and education is the key.