Research tools, research databases, catalog, prospector huh???

What does this mean?  I say that with some sort of jest  because I know what we mean by that because I have worked with these phrases professionally for the past several years. I also work with phrases like Virtual Private Network , IP address, and Domain Name System professionally as well.  These terms roll of the tongue to me and my peers because this is what we do; however what does any of this mean to our patrons? I asked my wife what she thought of some of the buttons on our site. Most of them sounded like jargon to her. I know this concept is nothing new to us because we have discussed it before; however still it is hard to separate ourselves from the jargon. It is so normal to us. In coming up with a new streamlined navigation scheme for our web site we are asking ourselves what do our patrons want to do on our site. So let us apply those questions to our existing jargon. When a patron comes to our site are they asking questions such as:

• Boy I sure am wondering about what databases the library has?
  
• Does this library participate in Prospector?
• I really want to use that library catalog.

Of course I am exaggerating to make an obvious point. Forgive me for my lack of subtlety. We all get it that this is silly and yet we still fall into that trap. My question is then, what do we call our jargon on our site. Is it OK  to say "find stuff for you to check out" instead of catalog, "information that we pay for so you don't have to" instead of database, or "stuff we don't have but other libraries do" instead of Prospector? I don't know. This is something that the web team is still working on and I would love to get some input on this. Do any of you reading this blog have any thoughts? 

What is ALD live?

We are planning on featuring video and additional podcasts on our site. ALD live will function as a brand for that kind of content.  Our first video projects should be on our site shortly. Patrons will be able to access to this content  two ways:  

1. We will create a section where all video/podcast content is aggregated in one section accessible by the ALD live logo located on our home page.   
2. Video/podcast content will also be displayed in its appropriate section by subject (ie. book reviews in the books and reading section, database articles in the research tools section). When listed in its section an ALD live logo on the bottom of the article to clearly identify it.
   

Teen Stuff

With all this talk of reworking the main Arapaoelibraries.org site many staff might be wondering what about the teen section. Well wonder no more. We are still considering many changes to the way we present teen content, and a redesign, to give the teen section its own look, is definitely an option on the table. Admittedly the main site is still going to be our main focus; however if we can find a way to do both areas at once with the resources we have then by golly we'll do it.

At present we have been doing some focus groups with teens, and some polling of staff. I had the pleasure of attending one of those focus groups. The teens in attendance were asked to react and comment to various library teen sites. One that indeed garnered a positive reaction was westerville's which is really just a blog, but with some cool features. I encourage all of you to take a look at their teen site and react to it as well. I would love to get some of your comments on it. We are very interested in doing something similar to what they have done.

Organizing articles and deciding what goes on top of Home Page

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One of the hang-ups that always seems to occur when displaying information in high profile areas is deciding what information is the most important. In the context of a newspaper it is commonly referred to as information that is displayed above the fold and on the front page. The web has a similar principle which is information above the scroll line and information on the home page. Organization of this information is often a challenge because all of this information is always important to someone. Consequently the Home Page of a web site can become a crowded space if not managed correctly.

We have struggled with this problem on the ALD website and in the past have made several decisions to support the prospect of displaying a lot of information on our home page. Often web staffers had to field debates as to whose information was most important. We compromised by creating our featured area at the top, and the latest at your library section at the bottom. The featured area was and still is an area reserved for information that is high profile and the "latest at your library" section was reserved for other items on the home page arranged alphabetically in a list.

OK now that I have sufficiently bored you with the background let me get to the gist of a discussion the web group had last week surrounding this issue. We were looking at new design possibilities for the home page and I brought up the possibility of displaying information in "the latest at your library" section in a blog like format where the newest information always went to the top in a rather indiscriminate manner. The pro side to that idea would be that it would take the guess work out of any debate on what information is important and what is not. The down side is that the information is more fleeting. We then discussed the possibility of adopting this "new information rises to the top" philosophy throughout the web site so that every page behaved in the same manner of the home page. This was not possible however because many sections of our site do not lend themselves to that style because information there is more stagnant.

In any event the issue is still not settled and we will continue to explore possibilities. In the mean time John L. has worked on some mock-ups to help us see these concepts visually. The very rough mock-up that I have attached to this story shows two new sections on our home page. You can see that we have replaced the news feed with a section called "Library News." In this section we wish to feature timely and to a certain extent important items. This is where we'll announce library closures, announcements of big event etc. The information here can be highlighted in red and it can be relatively static in that information here will not change out daily. The other section that we created is a "what's new" section similar to that on StaffNET. This section will be an aggressively dynamic section that could change every time a new item is added to our site. Depending on the day, this section could change out minute to minute. In order to keep this information from being overly fleeting we will include a link to all of the older "what’s new" items so interested patrons could browse through if they chose to.

Please let me know what you think and if you have any thoughts on what was discussed in this post.

To comment or not to comment

One of the features that we are considering strongly in DS is to give patrons the ability to submit their comments on our site. There are various ways to do this and we are thinking about many options. One way of doing this is to allow patrons to comment on every story that we run. In essence they could add their two cents on any piece of content that we offer. The mechanism would be similar to the commenting mechanism on this blog. At the bottom of each article there would be some link that forwards patrons to a page where they can enter their own text (related to the article or not.) The execution of this requires some more thought (or maybe it doesn't and we are over thinking it who knows?).

The challenge is to provide patrons free form access to comment on what they want to comment on. We do not want to tell people what to write about we simply want them to write. When patrons comment to individual stories that we feature on our web site we indirectly direct their posts. Hmm, I am going to take it on faith that my last sentence makes some kind of sense to you readers even though I said "indirectly direct."

We are also interested to see what patrons comment on without any prodding. At this point we are thinking about an additional mechanism where patrons and any staff for that matter, can seed their own discussions via an open discussion board.

Books, Movies and Music

This is an early mock-up on how we are planning to change the Books and Reading/Movies and Music section of our web site. It has since been tweaked, but I thought this might give you an idea as to where we are headed with the design. To give you an idea of where this page will appear in our site, this is the page that you will be taken to right after you click the "Books, Movies, and Music button. Most of the specific content at this point is just filler. Right now we are just examining the visual elements and the navigation.

Web Presence

If anyone has read many of my articles in the past regarding ALD and the web site, perhaps you have noticed that I have been using the term "web presence" as opposed to "web site." That choice of language is very intentional. Certainly our key "web presence" is indeed our web site; however that is not all. Our hope is that in the future not only will our patrons come to us as a destination on the web; as well they will find us in places that they are congegating elsewhere. We are well aware that many folks go to You Tube, MySpace, Flickr, etc. Wouldn't it be great if our current patrons or even potential new patrons wer to find us in many places. Well that's all on that.

Welcome

Thank you for visiting my blog. My intentions for this blog are relatively simple. It is my wish to share with the staff of ALD some insight into where we are headed with our new ALD web presence. It is my belief that by doing this blog staff will have a greater understanding on where we are going as a district in terms of Digital Library Services. Hopefully you will find this information useful and perhaps entertaining as well (assuming of course that you find, dry and sometimes technical web talk interesting.) Please feel free to comment back to me and I will do my best to answer any questions or comments. I would also love to get your opinions.

I am going to apologize in advance for any grammatical and or spelling errors in advance. I am sure that my Journalism professors in college will not be pleased about the progression of my writing skills but that is too bad. I went into technology for many reasons and the lack of red ink is certainly one of them.

Also all staff should be aware that I will often be sharing incomplete malformed ideas on this blog. Sometimes they will produce wonderful results and other times they will amount to nothing. It is a way to gain insight into what we are considering, as well as a way to understand the sheer volume of options that we have with the web. So if one day I mention that our new site will be hot pink please be assured that there are many other people on the web team who will most likely talk me off that ledge and thus that idea will not see the light of day.

• Posted on: Wed, Jun 20 2007 9:15 AM