Tag Archives: LIS Website

Categories and Tags

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Blog categories and tags: what they mean and when to use them

Categories = Audience

Tags = Description

LIS Website Team confession: As a team we’ve struggled with a way to articulate to everyone how and why we structured the categories on this blog in the way that we did, and how we intend categories and tags to be used. Hopefully this explanation will provide a useful distinction between the two, and give both post authors and blog readers guidance for how to use them.

Categories (Select your audience)

Use a category to reach an audience (or several).

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LIS Website Banner Image

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Each department and office site will have a banner image which identifies it. For the sites managed by people in LIS (the Library, Helpdesk, Curricular Technology, Telephone Services, etc.) the LIS Website Team decided that each site should use a banner image that identifies it as part of LIS which, when clicked, will bring the user back to the LIS landing page. Pam Fogg in College Communications prepared some examples of this graphic. These aren’t the final versions (they need a bit of touch up work), but they’re very close.

Which should we use?

Library_depthdr1

Library_depthdr2

Library_depthdr3

Library_depthdr4

Some library statistics – needed? On new site?

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I currently maintain two types of monthly statistics.

In the folder O:\ORGS\LIS\LISstaff\ILS III Millennium User Materials\EZProxy statistics you can see stats relating to useage of on-line resources through EZProxy. These are in the form of a bunch of .html files accessed through an index file I’ve named +START HERE 2009.html.

The other is a spreadsheet of the record counts and numbers for the various record types in the III database. O:\ORGS\LIS\LISstaff\ILS Implementation-III\III record counts.xls

If anyone uses these, they should be accessed somehow through the new website. Or they can be abolished as a “not to do” task.  Anybody care one way or the other?

Changes to left-hand menu in new (draft!) library site

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We’d like to get some quick feedback on 2 potential changes to the left-hand menu in the new library site.  If you go the library site in Drupal (under development!), you can see how these changes would look.

  1. Change the name “Library Departments” to “Contact Us.”  The purpose of this page is to give users quick access to departments like Reserves, Interlibrary Loan, Collection Management, etc.  Using the word “Contact” in the name of the page brings more attention to the page, we think.  It also might allow us to remove the long list of contact info that otherwise could be needed on the library collections pages.
  2. Create a new subpage under “Library Collections” called “Collections,” and nest pages like College Archives, Government Documents and Digital Collections in it.  This decreases the number of subpages under “Library Collections” to 6.  White Whale recommends no more than 8 subpages, and without this change, “Library Collections” has 11.  We considered nesting some of the collections under “Main Library,” but we think that nesting them under “Collections” gives them a little more prominence.

We think these changes will make it easier for most users to find what they’re looking for.  Do you agree?

LIS Website

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Thanks for your time yesterday at the all-LIS staff meeting. I know that your time is an extremely valuable resource , and I appreciate that you took time away from other pressing work to learn a little bit about what the web team is doing.
I have listed below the link to the Information Architecture site – I hope you’ll take a closer look.
LIS Website
It is a work in progress and we welcome your thoughts and ideas. You best know who your users are – and your feedback will help build a fabulous place for our users to discover LIS and all the resources and services we provide. Many thanks to those of you who filled out comment cards and asked questions at the meeting. We will take your comments and questions to heart and carefully evaluate them as we further develop and test the usability of the site.

We have some very exciting web tools and platforms to work with in developing the site. We hope that the intersection of multiple platforms on the LIS web site will give our users the best possible experience in navigating and accessing our services and resources – and also give LIS a chance to feature the great work we do.
Please be in touch. We can reached by blog, phone, email, and also in person. :-)
Elin, on behalf of the web team Ian, Barbara, Carrie, Liz, Jim, Jess and Doreen

Preview of Next Version of Shadowbox Theme

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I attended part of the LIS website team meeting today and gave a presentation of the ShadowBox theme and some of the new features that will be available in the next version including updates to author pages, more custom header options and most importantly, higher contrast text in comment fields.  I also gave a preview of some new ShadowBox variations based on the new college website design.  Below is a screencast from that meeting:

[middmedia achapin achapin shadowbox-lis.mp4]