David King gave a very good presentation at Computers in Libraries showing the evolution of the Kansas City Public Library web site's links section into a web guide following the About.com model. The site maintains a Yahoo!-style directory of over 2700+ links, some of which are local links, some database links, but most of which are links to external web sites. To assess whether or not their directory was being used, they kept counter statistics for a 12 month period. They found that their subject link pages were not being used as they expected, most external links weren't being used at all and local links and subscription databases were the most important.
Based on this research, they re-thought their external web link strategy and decided that they didn't need to keep an extensive subject-arranged directory of external links and surmised that their customers tended to use Google and Yahoo! before consulting the library databases. This should not be surprising, but clearly the data helped support this conclusion. But, looking around at other web sites, they saw that nearly everyone tended to do the same thing -- to maintain a subject-organized directory of links. Non-library sites, however, focussed on single topics and provide a "guided approach", spotlighting links, providing articles and tips and personalized summaries that help users make sense of resources.. About.com stood out. They found blogs to also be an interesting way of guiding users because of their freshness, and tendency to narrowly focus on a topic.
Their new strategy would combine the best of these 2 models and provide focussed, up-to-date links on fewer topics, provide highlights, tips and articles, up to date information as it happened. To translate this into the library site, they focussed on a narrower range of topics with a shallower hierarchy (few, if any sub-categories), showed more local information (news and events), showed only the best links (top 5-10). On each topic page, they provide links to related databases and library materials.
To see a before/after example of how this site has evolved, look at this comparison of the "African American" page:
I find this change of focus to be pretty effective. As King notes, it creates more local interest. It's also a more friendly and conversational approach that contrasts heavily with the sterile and machine-generated feel of the deep directory. The new approach just seems more human and more digestable. This is a good case study for pulling in the reigns on a library links directory that has grown to be too unwieldy for its users.
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