Wednesday, 27 October 2010

Library website features, show me what you've got!

In my last post I mentioned our library website getting a facelift. Since there was a big design change we wanted to get that live and make sure it worked before adding fancy features. In the future we're thinking to add some more features, in particular a search form for the Newton/LibrarySearch catalogues. I just wanted to throw it open to see what you especially like about your library website. I think "ask a librarian!" chat boxes can be a great feature, but for a library of our size (3 librarians) not practical. Making our New Acquisitions list an RSS feed is something I would find useful as a user, but then I'm not sure how many of our students would actually subscribe to it... I definitely want to get us on twitter and have a library blog and our librarian seems pretty receptive to that but the idea needs to be run past the Library Committee first. So hopefully before my trainee year is out you'll see us tweeting and blogging!

Patrons using the library computer in 1994, photo by Bill Dennison via Flickr

2 comments:

  1. I've just seen this library value calculator from the Denver Public Library, maybe there's a university equivalent of "the amount of your fees that go towards the library" compared to the value gained in return? Hmm not sure.
    http://denverlibrary.org/content/library-value-calculator

    ReplyDelete
  2. Annie - Good initiative. My vote would be to make it as human, light, and dynamic as possible (eg photos of people, video clips, tag-clouds etc), and as user-centric (cf librarian centric) as you can. Regards, Kevin

    ReplyDelete