How Efficient are University Library Portals of NIRF Ranked Indian Universities

Abstract

Seeing the underlying value of having a unified interface to update users about library services and activities, most libraries have developed library portals. The paper aims to evaluate the contents and services of top ten NIRF ranked university library portals and score them in the classes of Excellent, Good, Average and Poor. Further, the study aims to investigate the most preferred type of content available on Indian university library portals. The top ten NIRF ranked university library portals were evaluated using a checklist based framework covering broad categories such as Information about general, information about the library’s physical collection, Information about subscribed e-resources, information regarding the library’s services, and Information regarding the use of social Web technologies. Findings suggest that six of the selected library portals were rated in the ‘Average’ class(scores 40-60 %), which shows that most of them lack essential user-oriented information. JNU’s library portal carries maximum information for their users scoring maximum University Score of 28(62.22 %). Among the selected library portals 49.23 per cent prominently provide information about the library’s collection, followed by general information(46 %) and information regarding library services(35.33 %). Only one portal exploits social networking features. The study report that the Indian university library portals suffer from issues like currency, transparency, visibility of collection, availability of online services, and uniformity. The findings of the study will help the portal development team to select the most common category of content describing information about services and facilities available on library portals. The existing portals can also improve their interface based on the findings of the present study. Assessment of existing university library portals of the national top ten university library portals in India is the first attempt to evaluate this kind of sample. The study’s value lies in its evaluation framework, that’s minimal in nature covering the minimum information categories that must be available on any university library portal.