Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Some Web site changes

The Spring semester has begun!

Of course, on the very first school day of 2011, we had a big ice storm move through the area, and Gallaudet opened 2 hours later than normal. However, we were able to open on schedule because we had a pair of librarians here! Some students were quite relieved to discover this. Others wondered whether or not the storm was a sign of things to come; many who were here around this time last year remember the large snowstorms that hit us during the first and second weeks of February and shut campus down for a solid week. Coincidence or omen?

You decide. But read The Drunkard's Walk first (if you like coincidences, note the date on that blog post!).

In the meantime, the Library is ready for Spring 2011! We've spent the break mostly working on our internal processes and figuring out ways to make some things easier. You may have noticed that our home page, library.gallaudet.edu, looks a little bit different, for example (example? It's the topic of this post!). We've cleaned it up, gotten rid of redundant links, and tossed the "Library News" section altogether. It wasn't getting updated, and most news were being posted in this blog and in the "Announcements" box anyway, so it was just clutter. Instead, we've relocated our site-wide search box into that space.

On a somewhat deeper level, we've gotten rid of all the links that led to more or less the same place: ALADIN. We realized that people were getting confused between ALADIN Discovery (which is our catalog), ALADIN (which is the portal page that leads to all of our electronic resources), and the electronic databases linked to through ALADIN.

Instead, we've gotten rid of links to ALADIN entirely and made the article databases more accessible directly from the drop-down list on library.gallaudet.edu (first thing in the "Research Help" box on the left-hand side). Part of that included just making the list more readable -- no more "Multi-Subject: Articles." The only question that remains is whether or not the removal of the ALADIN link will actually alleviate confusion or exacerbate it. We'll be keeping a close eye on how you all respond to this change over the next couple of weeks.

We've also brought the Classic Catalog forward through a link from the main page. We've all found that, because of some oddities, there are some items from certain other WRLC universities that don't play well with the consortial loan system, so can't be requested through ALADIN Discovery -- but work just fine through Classic. Until that's been smoothed out, Classic's a good alternative when requesting books or articles from other schools in WRLC.

Right now, there's just a link to Classic -- it's not searchable from library.gallaudet.edu. You'll have to click on the link and then search when the new window pops up. I'm working on a solution to this, but it may take a teeny while.

Finally, we've also hopefully solved one of the biggest wellsprings of confusion for students: opening hours. You'll see right in the middle of the page that we have our hours for each day listed. Those hours are updated automatically, which makes our lives (and hopefully yours, too) easier; our thanks go to WRLC and their Library Systems department for that!

Let's see ... what else?

I think that more or less covers it for the time being. Work is continuing in increments; nothing huge has changed. Hopefully it's less annoying to use the home page, but as always, that depends on your feedback! Tell us what you think.

You're getting a vlog later this week; this I vow.

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