so you want a new website eric lease morgan university libraries of notre dame
TRANSCRIPT
Some background
The library’s website had been existence for four or five years. It “grew” rather organically and generally reflected the organizational structure of the institution.
Investigations - Focus groups
Information is hard to find Information is hard to get Communication can be improved
Some recommendations
Strengthen library’s understanding of user-centered design and put it into practice
Reconstitute the Web Team Implement a database-driven website Implement a current-awareness service
Survey said we need…
Better organization of materials Flatter hierarchy To provide more recommendations To provide more self-service services To improve search interface To make as much content available in
full-text as possible
We created a time table
|----- research -------|
|----- strategy -------|
|------ design -------|
|--- implementation --|
|----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----| S O N D J F M A M J
Months of 2003 - 2004
Strategy = Answers
‘Site mirrors purpose of Library: to facilitate learning, teaching, and scholarship
Primary audiences are the students, faculty, and staff of the University
The content is intended to highlight the most significant resources, a pathfinder
Graphic design
The library hired a University-based graphic designer. The designer helped the library move forward because of his expertise. “Everybody’s a critic.”
Vocabulary - Facets and terms
The creation of an unlimited number of facet/term combinations has allowed us to create very broad but shallow controlled vocabularies. Resources can then be assigned any number of facet/term combinations for classification purposes.
Example facet/term combinations
Subjects/Chemistry Subject/Life Science Formats/Books Formats/Journals Research Tools/Catalogs Research Tools/Indexes Research Tools/Dictionaries
Implementation - Five parts
Converting narrative texts Writing Perl modules Enhancing MARC records Importing data from catalog Writing reports against the database
Converting narrative texts
This was rather easy. We simply used the templates given to use by the graphic designer and used an HTML editor (Macromedia Contribute) to create new sets of documents.
Writing Perl modules
Sets of object oriented Perl modules provide the means of automating the input and output against the underlying relational database. These modules are distributed under the moniker of MyLibrary 3.0.
Enhancing MARC records
Using field 695 $f for facets Using field 695 $t for terms Using field 596 $d to denote that this
record is destined for website
Importing data from catalog
Every night, records containing “Y” in field 596 $d are dumped to a file. The Perl modules are then used to read the MARC records, and update the database accordingly.
More assessment
While we facilitated usability tests throughout the process, the one at the proved to be the most informative. In short, the website was navigable but people had trouble with articles, journals, and basic finding in the catalog.
The system is still not as easy as Google.
Next steps
Integrate customization and personalization features into the website
Re-work how the organization of databases is presented
Actively market the website Continue focus group interviews and
usability studies