Why Subject Guides Are Even More Awesome Than Before

Back in April (April 2, 2009 to be exact) I put up a post called Why Subject Guides Are Awesome. About a month after that, the rest of the University Libraries Web Committee and I started working on a new Subject Guides interface that would be easier to use than the old ones and could incorporate not only the Allen Library subject guides, but also Mortensen's print subject guides, web subject pages, and web reference tools. After about five months of design, web coding, and data entry, we finally went live with the new interface today (http://library.hartford.edu/allenlibrary/bigdatabase/guidelist.asp). In addition to an easier to read format, some of the benefits of the new guides are:

• The ability to search for guides via keywords
• Static URLs so you can bookmark your favorite guides
• Guides divided into categories for easier browsing
• Lists of guides related to the one you are currently viewing
• Links from book titles to the library catalog records for those books
• "Suggest a Topic" and "Suggest a Resource" forms for you to contribute ideas to the guides

We have several more improvements planned, but we wanted to make them accessible as soon as we could so that everybody could start taking advantage of them. So please take a look and let me know what you think! Feel free to leave suggestions for improvement in the comments.

Why Subject Guides Are Awesome

You know those times when you’re not looking for a specific item, but just have a vague idea and want to know where to browse? While the rest of the public services staff and I are more than glad to point you in the right direction, you might not realize that we’ve already done most of the work for you. Over the years, we’ve put together many subject guides that can help you in a number of ways, including giving you general call numbers. If you want to take a look, they are here:

Music
Dance
Theatre

Let’s say I want to browse the clarinet sonata section. I would simply access the woodwind music subject guide, look in the call number section for clarinet and piano, and find out that they are in M248-M252. I could use the dance subject guide to discover that dance biographies are GV1785. Although the classification system we use is highly organized, it can be confusing for browsing purposes, as the sections are very specific. The call number sections of the subject guides can really help make it easier.

But wait, there’s more! Most of the subject guides will also provide you a list of recommended books, periodicals, and websites on a given topic. While this may not help with research in a highly specialized area, it will help give you an idea of what is available in your general field of study. These lists are by no means comprehensive, so be sure not to rely solely on what we list; they are primarily there to get you started. The subject guides also list subject headings for searching the catalog, but that’s really a different blog posting altogether (that’s really a different blog posting).

These subject guides are accessible through our homepage, up in the quicklinks where it says Music – Dance – Theatre. If you would like to see more subject guides, we would be glad to make them. Just suggest a topic. I believe we should have two more coming out soon: orchestral music and performance injuries. Enjoy the guides!