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Tag Archives: library web site design
Redesign of the Library’s Web Site Begins
Greane Tree Technology is the successful bidder for the redesign project. In advance of the first meeting with them, A. Downing held focus groups with students to gather data to inform the initial discussion. Here are some of the findings:
What students already go to the web site to do (and we should make very simple to accomplish):
1. Find Books – Textbooks for courses and books recommended by instructors (i.e., known items), but also items that they are seeking on their own to support their class work. Students do not think that we should give equal attention to other formats (DVDs, CDs, etc.) on the home page. They also need to check the status of what they have found and perform functions such as renewal. Students want an easy way to search for e-books. It was also clear that they tend to believe that all e-books require an e-reader device that is apart from their laptop or desktop computer. They want to know what books have been recommended by their peers (especially previous students in a course) more often than a librarian or instructor.
2. Search Databases -They use only a small fraction of our total titles. Federated search interests them greatly.
3. They look for tutorials, but think of them as help sessions. They look for help in areas that may not be associated directly with the library (e.g., Excel).
Other factors to keep in mind:
1. Keep text to a minimum. Whenever possible, use images and icons to convey information. They do not linger on the home page long enough to read lists.
2. Locate search boxes at the top of the home page.
3. Locate library hours at the top of the home page.
4. Place a reference chat button on pages where assistance may be required, such as at the results screen of a federated search.
5. Arrange services by those most heavily used. Order all lists by frequency of use or in some cases alphabetical.
Next Steps:
Greane Tree will supply a map of the current site so that we can make decisions about organization. We will provide them with a description of how we intend to handle the functions in the current site that rely on custom code. BCTC has identified superior substitutes. We will give them access to a collection of images that we would like incorporated into the site. We will identify the first 10 announcements (graphics with text) that will occupy the main slide show on the home page.
Tech Sharecase, 18 March 2011
Attendees
Arthur Downing, Stephen Francoeur, Louise Klusek, Ryan Phillips, Mike Waldman
Website Redesign
We went to the website of the company that will be handling the redesign of the library’s site, Greane Tree Technology, and then to the site of one of their clients, the Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences.
While talking about the new home page for the Baruch site, we snickered at this cartoon from xckd:
While discussing the value of having student input for our redesign, we took a look at this student-led website, Baruch Connect, which is not authorized by the college.
Baruch College’s iPhone App
We ended by briefly talking about the new iPhone app for Baruch College.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Apps, iPhone, library web site design, Library web sites, Tech Sharecase
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Website Redesign Tips
As we get closer to beginning the redesign of the library’s website, it would be great if all of us tried to share whatever resources we find useful that relate to web design.
Here are the slides from two librarians who will be presenting on web design in libraries at the Computers in Libraries conference, which just started today.
Usability Express: Recipe for Libraries
View more presentations from Bohyun Kim
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Tagged library web site design, Usability, Web Site Design
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New USG Website
Undergraduate Student Government recently released its own website baruchconnect.com. It provides some insight into the type of information that students are interested in receiving about the college, as well as how they would like it organized and presented. The clubs section links to the public area of a hosted service that we license to manage club finances. A few of the features, such as the reporting of problems to USG, will be incorporated into the iPhone app. At some point the University will send them a “cease and desist” letter for unauthorized use of the College’s name on a .com site, but in the meantime we can learn something about how we should re-design our own site.
Instructional Aspects of the Library Website
I meant to post this to this blog a while ago and just realized that I never did:
From November 2009 through January 2010, a group of librarians consisting of Lisa Ellis, Stephen Francoeur, Randy Hensley, and Linda Rath, met a handful of times to generate ideas about ways that the library website could be more driven by instruction considerations. The list below was developed by this group and presented at the IS Division meeting on 27 January 2010.
- Opportunities for instruction on how to accomplish tasks. We’d make space in the design for elements that would allow students to learn more (screencasts, screencaptures, tutorials, etc.). The creation of such instructional content would take a much higher priority in our overall web design and maintenance efforts than in previous iterations of our website.
- Simplified interface and simplified organization.
- A goal of the design would be to find ways to build relationships with our users. In various ways, the site should signal to our users that there are librarians at work (offering help to users, providing services, etc.) The human presence of our staff should be visible on the site.
- We should design a LibX toolbar that would help our users locate licensed content that they found via Google Scholar, etc. That toolbar would be installed on every laptop we loan out and we would promote it to our students and faculty with the hope that it gets installed on their home computers and personal laptops.
- The home page should make it easy for users to do known item searches, particularly for those items they’ve found via search engines that they can’t access directly. In general, there should be a stronger relationship between the library website and the larger global search mechanisms (Google, etc.) that our students and faculty rely on. We want a tool that will help the student who comes to us asking, “I found this thing on the web but I can’t get into it without paying. Does the library have it?” Maybe we should also have our own customized advanced search page for Google (in the spirit of the Unofficial Google Advanced Search page perhaps).
- The library website (or maybe selected features) should be optimized to work in mobile devices.
- There should be tools to help students with concept mapping and mind mapping (see this list of mindmapping software) and generating keywords (examples include: KwMap; Visuwords; Visual Thesaurus; Google’s Wonder Wheel). The website of the U of Mississippi Libraries features a page with some of these tools as a way to help students kickstart the research process.
- There should be tools that offer rich feedback on every page. See for example: UT Chattanooga’s Lupton Library (uses service from GetSatisfaction; look for the “Feedback” tab on left side of every web page) and Cal State San Marcos Library (gives you a web survey form when you click the “feedback” tab on the right side of any web page).
- Having a web designer who is skilled in graphic design as well as the basics of coding is absolutely critical. We need someone with a strong design sensibility, not just someone capable of making a utilitarian design.
- A feature for followup, making sure searches found what they needed. Maybe when users use the back button on the browser to return to the library web site from a search of a database they launched via the library web site, they’d see a page from us asking, “Did you find what you needed?” and that could offer suggestions of related or similar databases to also try.
- The databases page should feature unique URLs for each subject set of databases and for each database. Currently, if you go to the databases page and get a list of psychology databases, the URL that is generated is the same one you’d get if you got the list of accounting databases. Subject sets of databases should have their own URLs, something like:
http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/databases/psychology/
Individual databases should also have their own URLs, something like:
http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/databases/psycinfo/
By creating URLs like this, users can easily share and bookmark specific resources or sets of resources.
- We need to have a rich set of tools for web analytics.
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Tagged library web site design, Library web sites
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University of Windsor’s Analysis of Library Site Traffic
An interesting presentation and conversation thread was started on FriendFeed today by Mita Williams about the analysis she and her colleagues have done of the traffic on their library’s website.
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Tagged library web site design, Library web sites
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Usability Testing LibGuides
The libraries at the University of Michigan just released a report about usability issues with LibGuides that is worth taking a look at.
Tech Sharecase, 20 August 2009
Attendees
Ryan Phillips, Stephen Francoeur, Randy Hensley, Mike Waldman, Jean Yaremchuk, Joseph Hartnett
Squirrelizer and Cornify
Because we like to have fun as well as talk about serious topics, we started off with a couple of silly sites. Squirrelizer will insert the newly famous squirrel image into your pictures. Cornify will add pretty rainbows and unicorns to a web site or image (until your stomach turns).
Bing News vs. Google News
Google News offers a richer interface with better faceted navigation. Bing’s news section suffers at the moment from not having enough sources to provide, but Microsoft is likely working on lots of deals with news publishers now. It may be that Bing is also working on a finance section to rival Yahoo! Finance (although with the Yahoo!/Microsoft deal from last month, it’s not clear what’s going to happen). It was remarked that Bing is making a more competitive landscape now.
NewsGator
NewsGator announced that they are dropping its longtime desktop RSS reader and focusing on a mobile app version instead. Since Microsoft Outlook 2007 was released, which featured a built in RSS reader, the market for desktop RSS readers has declined. Jean mentioned that she used PHP to code her own desktop RSS reader.
Visio
Jean used Visio for a couple of things recently: for planning display cases layouts and for creating a Gantt charts. Maybe at an upcoming sharecase where there is a critical mass of library staff attending, she can give a demo of the software.
Exporting from Aleph
Jean created a script that will allow us to run reports on our subject areas and export to Excel.
Library Technology for Assistive Services
We talked about assistive technology that we have in the 3rd floor room and on the 2nd floor.
Library Web Site Design
A discussion about how we update content in our library web site led to a broader discussion of library web site design and looks at lots of notable sites. One resource that is helpful when talking about web site design is Jon Kupersmith’s Library Terms That Users Understand.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged assistive technology, Ex Libris Aleph, Google News, Jon Kupersmith, library web site design, Microsoft Corporation, Microsoft Visio, NewsGator Technologies, PHP, RSS, Tech Sharecase, Web Site Design, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Inc.
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