I posted a little bit about this on my blog relating to something else. Again if you haven’t read it give Defensive Design for the Web a read. Well worth it.

But advertising services is tricky.

Most users seek out services at point-of-need. Interlibrary loan and research help (i.e., reference) services are most useful to a library user when they can’t find what they are looking for.

The problem with advertising those services at the level of the library home page or even the catalog home page is that, at that level, the user doesn’t really know that they need the service — and thus largely ignore such information.

But consider a different approach: About 95% of our interlibrary loan traffic here at San Marcos comes from SFX. When a user selects our SFX button from a search result in one of our research databases, SFX determines whether we have the article online or in print. If neither of those is available, SFX offers the user a pre-populated ILL form.

It’s a service at point-of-need.

The result is that ILL requests here have increased 400% in the last three years. At this point, we’re talking about ways to curb the rising costs of interlibrary loan rather than how best to promote it — a scenario inconceivable to the library before we implemented SFX.

There are some great services we can provide our users, but our systems need to be smart about offering those when the user actually needs them, and only when they need them. I think the Innovative XML Server and other web service APIs can provide us the means to offer more dynamic and contextualized services.

The catalog has lost a lot of prominence to online databases (I see you’ve got Safari full-text books too), so it leaves patrons at a loss to know where they should search. Metasearch is one attempt to solve this, but I think it comes up short in a lot of ways. The SPL solution shows the smarts and elegance I’m looking for.