Library Web: Gateway or Destination?

Some more quotes / paraphrases from various sessions at the Computers in Libraries 2007 conference:

• "Users spend most of their time on other sites than your site." (Attributed to Jakob Nielsen by Jeff Wisniewski, University of Pittsburgh, in "Web Managers Academy: Survival Guide for Library Web Site Redesigns" pre-conference workshop)
• We should think of the library as a search destination, focusing on global discovery leading to local content. (My paraphrase of Marshall Breeding, Vanderbilt University Library, in "Millennials & the Library" presentation)
• We need to get away from the idea that the library's web site and its OPAC are separate things. (My paraphrase of Tim Spalding, LibraryThing, in "Catalogs/OPAC's for the Future" presentation)
• Libraries still need an ILS but it will not be the way that users find what they want. Discovery now happens at the network level, disaggregated from the ILS. New finding tools make traditional library catalogs obsolete. The next generation finding tools will search a wide variety of sources--they will not be a library catalog. (Roy Tennant, California Digital Library, "Catalogs/OPAC's for the Future" presentation)

In our library, we're currently working on redesigning the top page of the web site. One term that we're using a lot is gateway--we want the site to be a gateway to all the libraries on campus, a gateway to library resources wherever they happen to be. Not to disparage this intent, but the thoughts noted above, combined with our findings (not unique to Duke, I suspect) that most of our users start their research at Google or Google Scholar (and not the library's web site), lead me to think that we ought to be putting at least as much effort into making the library's web presence an effective destination as into making it an effective gateway.

What I mean by this is making sure that library resources are both findable and linkable from outside the library's web site.

Findable: Do our resource strengths show up near the top of relevant Google searches? Are we using metadata as effectively as we could? Are we putting our resources where our patrons are (Blackboard, student portal, Facebook, etc.) so that they can find our resources whether or not they find us first?

Linkable: Once someone has found a useful resource, how easily can they store it for future reference? How easily can they share it with others? Can you look up a book in our online catalog and easily post its link to del.icio.us or cite it in a blog entry? What about an article in one of our databases?

As noted above, how can we insure that people can find our resources without having to find us first?