Tag Archives: Library web sites

I love the “Have an Idea?” feature linked to throughout the website for the library at Cal State San Marcos. Clicking the link (which features a lightbulb icon) takes you to this “Have an Idea” page where you can submit your idea and view and vote on the ideas of others.

Below is the typography treatment that will be used in the Library’s new web site.

As we begin work on redesigning the library website, I’d like to put in my two cents for simplifying things. This quote from Aaron Schmidt‘s recent blog post at Walking Paper, “Library Websites Should Be Smaller,” nicely sums up the argument for me:

For years, I’ve heard talk about libraries cutting the cord on irrelevant services. Yet I haven’t heard as much discussion about which sacred web cows we can put out to pasture. This might in part be owing to the perception that a 200-page website isn’t more expensive to manage than a 50-page one. While probably true in terms of hosting fees, it isn’t otherwise true. Good content takes staff time to produce and arrange, and the navigational overhead can be a time expenditure for users.

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.

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.

1. 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.
2. Simplified interface and simplified organization.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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).
6. The library website (or maybe selected features) should be optimized to work in mobile devices.
7. 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.
8. 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).
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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.

12. We need to have a rich set of tools for web analytics.

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.