Web site logical path: [www.psy.gla.ac.uk] [~steve] [resources] [launchpad] [this page]
Related pages: [main launchpad]     [about the launchpad]     [more links]     [example searches]

About the Launch pad for literature searches

Contents (click to jump to a section)

• Rationale for its design
• Help for users
• Help for the designer (me)

Rationale for its design

The aim of any "launchpad" page is to be like a browser's "Home page": a page that loads as fast as possible, that users come back to frequently, and that contains a lot of much-used links that are good starting points for that user and task. Thus I want to keep the page small by including only heavily used links; and with very small explanations of what they are, since anyone who uses the launchpad much will soon know what the links mean. In fact, I've compromised. In my private launchpad I have got it down to a single screen (no scrolling), which I haven't managed for this launchpad. To get it down, I pack much more on one line, and reduce descriptions of links to about 5 letters each and have no section headings. In this launchpad, I've used headings and blank lines, and mostly have only one logical item per line. This is clearer for new users, but means not everything can be seen at one time.

The idea of a launchpad is to be designed around a task (literature searches), rather than a logical structure. I have followed this task-orientation in dividing the launchpad into sections. Thus I haven't put everything to do with Strathclyde library together, but put all the catalogues together, and all the opening-hour information together, because I expect users to need these kinds of information at different times. The tasks I have identified are:

• Finding a paper's details i.e. that it exists, and what its bibliographic details are.
• Finding whether a book (or a volume of a journal) is in a library we can use.
• Finding whether a book exists at all. This is for when you wonder if you have the right details of a book, or enough details. For this, it would be nice to have a catalogue of all books that exist. Failing that, the catalogue of really big academic libraries are a help, and of really big bookshops for books in print.
• If you know a book is in a particular library, then you need to know where the library is (do YOU know where the chemistry dept. library is?) and when it is open. This can be found online too. Since the opening hours on the web could be out of date, using the phone numbers given there is useful too.
• Searching the web. This is subdivided into:
  • General search engines
  • Searching university sites
  • Electronic journals; TV; Newspapers
  Perhaps,however, it should have been divided into something more like subtasks:
  • Finding people (i.e. academic authors)
  • Finding sites / labs / units
  • Finding papers
  • Finding by topic (general search by words)

I've included both telnet and WWW interfaces to databases, where available, because I find the telnet ones are often considerably faster (at least from my office computer) than the WWW ones, even though they are less good looking.

Help for users