The next get together of the Tech Sharecase will be on Friday, June 10. At the last meeting, we had a great discussion of the issue of excessive printing by students, faculty, and staff on campus and ways that we could move to being less reliant on paper printouts. You can read notes from that meeting as well as all the previous ones by visiting the tag for “Tech Sharecase” on this blog.
Since the themed meetings have been working well, I thought that at this Friday’s meeting we could talk about any aspect of website design that has our attention on that day. It would be great if you could bring to the meeting at least one example of a notable college or library website that exemplifies something important we should keep in mind as the Newman Library’s website gets redesigned.
Hope to see you this Friday!
The latest issue of College and Research Libraries News has an interesting article on the website redesign in the University of California libraries’ website. Their goal was to create best practices and more standardization across all the websites.
What I felt was most interesting relating to our own efforts here was the search for best nomenclature. The authors found that many of the library services and resources were called differently across the board (which I think we have all experienced). What they did was to search their QuestionPoint logs to see how the users referred to those services and resources, as a way to gather language that is meaningful to users. Here are some examples of the changes: “Circulation information” became “Borrowing”, “Course reserves” became “Reserves”. Users also wanted the categories Databases and Articles to be separate and not lumped together as we often see in library websites.
Your comment reminds me of one of the most useful sites for library web site design, Library Terms That Users Understand. The site is a compendium of research from usability studies about what words users prefer when naming services and resources on library web sites.