Make every click count with OCLC’s web visibility program

The University of San Diego’s Copley Library not only survived, but thrived, through a renovation, COVID-19, a website redesign, an 18-month e-resources librarian position vacancy, and an ILS migration—all of which occurred between 2019 and mid-2024. And during those last 14 months, the library gained 6,947 new clicks to its library catalog resulting from Copley’s participation in OCLC’s web visibility program.

Copley launched its renovation in mid-2019, requiring the physical collection to be moved into storage. In addition to serving students and faculty, Copley also participates in San Diego Circuit, a local resource sharing group. The library put retrieval systems in place and continued to meet users’ expectations of 24-hour turnaround for resources throughout the renovation, which included the addition of 25 study rooms, three classrooms, and two reading rooms. And then as the renovation neared completion, COVID-19 emerged. But because of the renovation, Copley already had retrieval systems in place for its users.

“Requests for ebooks and streaming media shot through the roof,” said Laura Turner, Associate Dean, Head of Collections, Access, and Discovery. “For discovery, we prioritized getting things faster to our users, leveraging curbside and mail delivery. We also collaborated with vendors on developing deposit accounts and streaming media. We joined HathiTrust to take advantage of its temporary access services. We also used this time to clean up harmful subject headings, enhance bibliographic records, and add theses and dissertations.”

Between early 2021 and mid-2023, Copley began conducting user testing to inform its website redesign, with special focus on further refining the discovery experience. During this time, Copley’s e-resources librarian left the university. Although the 18-month vacancy was challenging, the team benefited from gaining a deeper understanding of the discovery journey and the life cycle of its resources. Finally, throughout the first half of 2024, Copley migrated to a new ILS.

In early 2020, Laura attended a webinar about OCLC’s web visibility program, which is designed to connect web users to libraries from search engines and popular websites where they usually begin their searches. Copley’s existing OCLC subscriptions enabled its participation in the program, and in December 2022, the library qualified for direct links from Google Search results, the expansion of a 20+ year partnership between OCLC and Google. Immediately, the library experienced an uptick in clicks to resources in its catalog. Between August 2022 and April 2024, Copley had gained 2,387 clicks stemming from WorldCat.org, representing people who accessed the site directly or linked to it from OCLC partners like Google Books, Wikipedia, and Goodreads. Then between December 2022 (when Copley went live with direct links from Google Search) and April 2024, the library gained an additional 4,560 clicks.

“We gained all of these clicks during the e-resources position vacancy, COVID, and several other projects, when everything was a blur,” said Laura. “The results were mind blowing. Because the program uses geolocation, we knew we were connecting our user community to our resources. This was so exciting, because to me, every click counts. Every click is important. And the web visibility program was so easy for us to implement.”

Location

• San Diego, California, USA

Library at a glance

• Private college with just over 8,200 full-time undergraduate, graduate, doctoral, and law students
• Institution listed as R2 in the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education
• Member of San Diego Circuit, a local resource sharing group comprised of public and academic libraries