Family Man Librarian

I’ve been working with my students on a website redesign project for a while now for the library where I work. The existing website looks terrible right now — outdated and, as Ashley (a former student) put it, “Frontpage-ish.” ‘Course that was a severe blow to Matt’s pride The existing website has functioned pretty well for a few years, but in the meantime, the larger university implemented a major upgrade to the look and feel of its website and we want to make the library website more consonant with the general university site.

We’re at work on several things, but the main elements that we’re putting in place include:

• a new logo that tries to convey a new view of the library as a “hybrid” or marriage of traditional and online collections
• a new, open source CMS platform to replace our existing, homegrown CMS, that will make it much easier to accomplish the goal of “push button publishing.”

The latter point is particularly important because if we make the right choices, we can drastically reduce the effort required to bring up a new website, as well as the effort required to maintain it and refresh it over time. We’ve decided to use Drupal because it most closely matches our requirements and because others in the library technology community spoke highly of it (see, e.g. discussion of CMSs in the Web4Lib discussion list archives). The only library website that I know of that’s using it in production is the Louisville (OH) Public Library, but there probably are others. This is a really exciting open source project with a ton of useful add-on modules that we plan to use.

Regarding a new logo, we’re working on refining a design chosen from a class project done by typography students at my institution. The intention is for more consistent branding across all library publications, not just the website.

So, now what? Well, any redesign is a big challenge in terms of getting it “right.” What are some things we’re thinking about in terms of the new site? Here are some:

• a Google-like search box on the first page, powered by MetaLib
• a simpler, more professional look all ’round (this is hard to define, of course)
• prominent placement of our Ask-A-Librarian service
• RSS-ify as much as possible
• enable most recent five or so postings from Z-Blog to be visible on first page
• make it as easy as possible for other people in the library to create and maintain content rather than relying on me to do it all, all the time
• make the interface not only nice to look at but highly functional
• meet W3C accessibility standards

One of the things I’ve tried to do is scan other library websites to cadge ideas. If anyone reading this blog has a suggestion for a website that they really like for whatever reason, would you please leave a comment to tell me where to look? Thanks.