Greek Academic and Research Libraries Websites as Communication Tools : an assessment of interactivity and communication trends in the new digital landscape

This study aims to research, record and describe the existing trends and communicative abilities of Greek academic libraries’ sites and research institutions resulting from the adoption and implementation of technological elements of interactivity. In particular, the primary issue is the extent of their structural interactivity, what is the degree and intensity of application, what is the nature and distribution into distinctive types of interactivity and how this is reflected in comparison with interactivity to respective international websites. The author studied by using the content analysis method in a selected sample of 73 websites of libraries, which includes 61 Greek academic and research organizations and 12 international universities around the world whereas 4 coders analyze and encode technological interactive elements within two months (Dec. 2012-Jan. 2013). For the coding, it was adopted the multidimensional aspect of the concept of structural interactivity in websites and the respective multifaceted tool for measuring interactivity as technological features in websites as proposed by McMillan, et al. (2008). First, the statistical analysis of the research data reveal that websites of Greek libraries show a low level of overall interactivity with predominance type of them the human-to-computer interactivity. Second, it points out the limited use of personalized interactive elements, the total lack of interactive elements that facilitate real-time (synchronous) communication and the few interactive elements which facilitate the customizing and adding content. Last but not least, it was found to exist a statistically significant difference in all types of interactivity between the Greek and international libraries’ websites that are referred in this research but no difference was found among the Greek websites groups. This study contributes to the management of communication between organizations and public by reinforcing the perspective of research, with the expectation of gain a longitudinal character and expand the practice possibilities of websites for benefit of organizations themselves, their customers and their stakeholders in enhancing the value of organizations.