Purdue University Experiments With Mapping

Hal Kirkwood is an Associate Professor and one of the librarians in the Management & Economics Library at Purdue's Krannert School of Management. He created a map that is designed to provide an alternative method of access for students and faculty to the multitude of business databases available. It started out as a proximity map and has since mutated to the current version.

He's working on improving the usability/viewability of it, as well as providing a layer of information on where the information comes from, how it flows through the topics, and then into the databases. The goal is to not only direct students to the proper resources for their information needs, but to also improve their awareness of the business research process.

So far it has been very well received by students. Due to the emphasis on technology transfer at Purdue, many more engineering students are looking for business information and they find the map to be extremely useful. Hal and his team will be testing and experimenting more with it this Spring semester and presenting on it at the Computers in Libraries conference in April.