Action to be taken following meeting with WW. Come up with possible quick links based on immediate needs of constituencies.
Decide on recommended terminology and number of quick links for the college website.
List just 2?
Library
Technical Support
Or more? If more than 2 – what should they be?
Media Services
Telephone Services
Please add your comments, ideas, suggestions to this post by 5 pm on Tuesday. Final vote at our Wed meeting.
I think Quick Links on the home page should be things that *all* audiences are interested in, including external audiences, so I like leaving it at just Library and Technical Support, though I think we might want to consider adding “Library & Information Services” as a third. Let people go to our landing page to find general stuff and the two specific pages to find content related to those.
I think Media Services, Telephone Services and other links like Curricular Technology belong on the audience gateway pages like Faculty & Staff or Students, as well as Offices & Services because they chiefly serve our internal audiences.
On a slightly-related topic, I saw something yesterday that made me think. It’s been brought up a couple times that when you say “Library” you don’t always mean the collection. You might also mean the building, which contains the Helpdesk, and CTLR, and now Undergraduate Research, and several other things not directly related to, well, stacks. White Whale developed a “disambiguation page” for Bread Loaf to solve the problem of that word meaning BLSE and BLWC and a mountain, and a ski touring center, and the place where the Robert Frost cabin is, etc.
This page has the bold headline “Bread Loaf is a mountain, and a school, and a conference, and a legend.” Then there are three columns: one for BLSE, one for BLWC, and one for History & Culture, which includes facilities as well. Bread Loaf might not use this concept, but I asked Jason if we might adopt it for other uses and he seemed amenable to the idea.
I’m *not* saying this should be the Library home page. That should be the classic, collection-based Library page we’ve been discussing all along. However, what if this was the page you saw when you searched for the word “library”? It wouldn’t appear elsewhere in the navigation, it wouldn’t be linked from the LIS landing page, it would just be this special case to ask the user, “did you mean the building or the collection, or something else?”
We might title the page “The Library is a building, and collections, and people.” Then the first column could be links to the departments you’d find in the Main Library building: the Library (obviously), Helpdesk, CTLR, URO, etc. The second column would contain links to each of the branch pages, MIDCAT, subject guides, journals, etc. The third column could contain links to the Directory listings for everyone who works in the Main Library.
Anyway, just a random thought I had. Stop by my office or ask me elsewhere and I’ll show you the disambiguation page mockup design, which isn’t really suited for public consumption.
Question: Technical support vs. Technology support–is one better than the other?
p.s. I really like the disambiguation page idea, and thought the Breadloaf example was very elegant.
Since they showed it off (and people liked it for Bread Loaf) here’s a link to the disambiguation page for people who weren’t able to attend the meeting today and want to take a look: http://middlebury.babywhale.net/mockup/breadloaf.html
I also really liked the Bread Loaf page also and I really liked Ian’s ideas for our page. We need to spend more time on this issue since everything included on the landing page cannot be placed in just under Library and Technology.