Overview
Located in Nevada’s second largest city, Henderson, Nevada State College is part of the Henderson-Las Vegas metropolitan area. The college offers more than 35 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in education, liberal arts and sciences and nursing. An integral part of the college is its award-winning Marydean Martin Library, the first digital academic library in the state and recipient of the 2020 Excellence in Academic Libraries Award from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).
To support the research needs of its nearly 5,800 students and 275 faculty members, the Marydean Martin Library provides access to more than one million e-books and 14 million scholarly articles. The library also provides more than two million print books through their partner academic libraries in Southern Nevada. In addition, the library subscribes to 47 EBSCO databases including Academic Search™ Premier, CINAHL® and ERIC®. Recently, the library launched a new-and-improved website powered by Stacks, a fully hosted web platform available only through EBSCO.
Challenges
According to Lauren Johnson, User Experience Librarian, the library did not initially have a traditional website, and this caused some confusion when onboarding students.
“We had been using a Canvas course site to link users to library resources,” Johnson explained. “In instruction sessions, we directed students to the Primo landing page as the place to begin a search — and to confuse matters there was also an informational page about the library on the college’s website that also contained a search.”
Johnson realized there needed to be a stronger web presence and that disparate pages and web locations needed to be streamlined into a single website. So, she and her colleagues began looking for a tool that would allow them to quickly build a website without requiring extensive coding knowledge.
“It would have taken considerable time for someone on the team to acquire those skills,” she said.
Creating a new library website was an unchartered course for the library, but the combination of Stacks’ easy-to-use platform and along-the-way customer support made it the right solution.
“Stacks is hassle-free and a great platform for creating websites — no coding knowledge required. The integrations are easy and the whole setup is fast. There is no need to go on using a platform that isn’t built for your needs.”
“Stacks is hassle-free and a great platform for creating websites — no coding knowledge required. The integrations are easy and the whole setup is fast. There is no need to go on using a platform that isn’t built for your needs.”
Solutions
If finding an intuitive webite was the staff’s first priority, the need for easy integrations with existing systems and platforms was a close second.
“Stacks’ easy integrations stood out, as well as how simple it seemed to create and manage every aspect of the website,” Johnson said. “We were also able to move all our forms, like Instruction Requests, out of Qualtrics and into Stacks so that the information could be in one place.”
In addition, Johnson was able to easily add the college’s branding and worked with the Stacks team to align the look and feel of the library website with the college’s website, “which got us support and compliments from the college’s marketing department.”
Benefits & Results
Stacks has made it possible for Nevada State College to build an intuitive library website that enables students to easily locate content and resources, and feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. According to one student, the cohesive look and feel made the library “feel more like a library.”
As the builders and owners of the new website, library staff members are seeing their work appreciated across campus.
“I was proud to present the library’s new website to the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences at their 2019 Development and Updates Meeting,” said Library Director Nathaniel King. “The site received an ovation of applause from the group. The Stacks site is that much better than our previous website.”
Stacks has been able to give the library the ability to create a user-focused website that has exceeded expectations in every way.
“Stacks is hassle-free and a great platform for creating websites — no coding knowledge required,” said Johnson. “The integrations are easy and the whole setup is fast. There is no need to go on using a platform that isn’t built for your needs.”