A meta-study (a study of a bunch of other studies, basically) has become available that is of interest to any librarian who has anything at all to do with their library’s website. In this study of library website usability studies, John Kupersmith gives some excellent advice on using Terms that Library Users Understand. He’s gone through all those studies (so that we don’t have to!) and pulled out the general findings – stuff like the fact that people who use our websites have no idea what the word “Databases” really means, in regards to our services, at least.
There are some really good bits of advice here (use “Find Books” not “Catalog” to point people to your… catalog and use “Get books from other libraries” instead of InterLibrary Loan) and some excellent insights into how normal people use our websites.