Library and Information Science Commons^™

Lengthy descriptions of research databases can unintentionally cause extraneous cognitive load at a moment when a student researcher is already taxed. Furthermore, publisher descriptions of databases often don’t conform to students’ mental models. To address this problem, librarians at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) combined data from established LibGuides best practices and student vocabulary mined from chat reference transcripts to design a new formula for database descriptions in LibGuides.

Recognizing that online users naturally “skim” websites, the new descriptions are broken down into shorter chunks of information with separate headings for “subjects,” “description,” and “contents.” The subjects are based on the …