Team, please find the new article here, and have at it!:
LIS Website Information Architecture
(Also linked from our team wiki page.)
FYI: This follows the IA documents White Whale created for other parts of the College web redo project. It’s primarily a high-level guide to page & subpage structure, not a detailed list of page contents (though there are some content recommendations in the notes sections). See middfiles:\orgs\WebMakeover\IA Documents for examples (I used Academics when creating the wiki page.)
A revised visual diagram (Powerpoint) of the high-level LIS Website IA is now linked within in the wiki article. Please feel free to edit: find the link for editing in the article. Thanks!
Hi Web team,
I’m wondering why “Other Collections on Campus” will be included in the LIS site. I can understand that since they’re all sort of ‘libraries’ it would be ‘intuitive’ to include them under “Library Collections.” Yet, on the other hand, the materials that comprise those collections are not cataloged (with the exceptions of Career Services and the Scott Center), they are not acquired with LIS funds, and they are not housed in “LIS buildings.” Given all this, I kinda don’t understand why they should be included under “Library collections.”
Also, just so you know – I believe that the contents of what used to be the Curriculum Materials Center at Twilight, the lending library at Human Resources, and a small ‘library’ at Palana have been or are being added to the Library collections (as ‘gifts,’ some of which have been weeded).
Hi Arabella,
Thanks for your comments here and on the previous post about the library IA!
“Other Collections on Campus” – Yes, from an organizational standpoint, these collections aren’t LIS. And they’re quite different from our collections since we don’t manage them. But they are collections with resources that students can consult, just like our libraries are. Our goal was to link our collections up with theirs, at least tangentially. Calling them “Other collections on campus” does this, I think. It gives them some visibility but makes it clear that they won’t be found in Main Lib, Armstrong or Music. I expect that some of our subject guides refer to some of these collections, too.
Twilight – We put a question mark there as a placeholder–we wanted to confirm with someone that this collection is indeed being added to the Main Lib. It sounds like it is, so I’ll delete it! Thanks.
Scott Center – I didn’t even know about this collection. Sounds like it should be added! That probably wasn’t your intention when you mentioned it though. :)
Regarding your earlier post, in which you asked if we could develop a library toolbar like the one at ASU: We have one. It’s called LibX. It’s pretty neat but I haven’t used it since I reimaged my computer, so I’m not sure if it’s still completely functional. Probably is. There are links to the toolbar for Firefox and IE on a Research Shortcuts guide I created for a workshop. In the new site, we hope to make this tool more visible! Maybe in a MIDCAT guides section…? I need to talk with a few others about this.
Thanks again! Please keep sending in your questions.
Carrie’s response regarding links to non-LIS maintained resources is also in keeping with our goal of (and White Whale’s recommendations for) creating a web presence that is structured not in terms of functional work roles (or in this case, paths to or descriptions of things that fall strictly under our own organizational purview), but rather in terms of what users need and expect. We should give users additional paths to resources wherever it makes sense, even if that means guiding them to other departments and resources outside of LIS.
Thanks, Jess and Carrie!
I pretty much thought the intention was to ‘cross silos’ and ‘consolidate’ resources, and that’s great. (And, actually, I kinda intended that the Scott Center collection should be added, if you’re sure you’re going to do this.)
OK, then, depending on how you want to define ‘other collections on campus’, I happen to know because I/we send outdated periodicals to them (6-months- or 1-year-old stuff that we don’t bind) that at least the Mathematics, Economics, and German departments also have ‘collections’ or at least reading areas.
These departmental reading areas also contain resources that students can consult – will you include them, too? I’m guessing that at least some of them probably have as much reading/browsing material as the Scott Center does. Where/how do you draw a line? How will you be sure that you’ve included everything on campus, or do you want to? And if you don’t want to, why not?
I kinda hate to bring all this up because I totally agree with the _concept_ that it’s great to bring together in one spot as much as possible. I just know there’s a lot out there and…. well, I’ll shut up now since I’ve made all the points I want to make, inconclusive and contradictory though they may be.
Good luck! (and the Web team is doing excellent work – thank you!)
PS to Carrie – thanks for the LibX info. I even had it on a previous version of Firefox on a previous computer, but I’d forgotten all about it. Thanks!
Arabella – If it works, we’ve decided to include LibX in the “carousel” at the bottom of the library site. And in other places on the site too of course.
Thanks for putting out the computer in the lobby so we can explore the new website. I am dissappointed that LIS is not on the main page nor the quick links, but maybe I just have too much of a vested interest. However, when we first put up Big Bad’s design of the now current website, it did not include LIS on the main page and users all over campus screamed to get LIS put back on the main page (as it was in the prev. website) and thus it was added in shortly thereafter. When I didn’t find LIS under quicklinks, I went to academics, but I can only find Library not all of LIS. (I’ve now discovered its under offices and services with everything else and also under the pages for student and faculty/staff). Personally I don’t think LIS is prominent enough on the student page – you have to scroll down and if they want to do research, they have to look under Tools and Technology to find the Library, and resetting their password is higher up than the main LIS page). I thought LIS was going to be listed under Quick Links at least, which to my mind should be the most frequently accessed webpages that aren’t listed on the main page. There is a link to the bookstore but not LIS?? Does the bookstore really get more traffic than LIS, technology, and the library? It just reinforces the notion that the main college website is all about admissions and making money (i.e seeking donations or selling something). It will be interesting to see what comments our users make. But I will say there are many, many improvements so I thank you for all your hard work!
Thanks for these comments Brenda. It’s important to point out that the site on display in the Library atrium is a mockup from White Whale that is very close to the final look-and-feel, but doesn’t have all of the details ironed out. Particularly, the Quick Links are some suggestions from White Whale which we will tweak. The LIS Website Team requested, and received approval from the AD Team, to define the paths to the LIS site on our home page and other areas of the site. Our proposal is to have two links to LIS sites, in addition to links to services like Webmail and BannerWeb that we know must be in the list. The two links will be Library and Technology Help.
We looked at usage statistics for the current LIS site and found that these two areas of the site receive the vast majority of the site traffic. The Library site gets 50% of the clicks from the LIS home page. Since so many of our visitors end up on the Library and Helpdesk sites, we want to help them get there as quickly as possible, which we can do with direct links in the Quick Links area. You’re right to point out that LIS gets more traffic than the bookstore, but the *only* way to get to the bookstore on our current site is through that footer, while there are many paths to LIS. Since the bookstore is a sort of stand-alone site, this makes sense to continue.
That doesn’t mean that we think nobody should visit the LIS home page! On the contrary, we’re discussing next week how we’ll implement the recommendation that all of the LIS related sites (Libraries, Helpdesk, Curricular Technology, Telephone Services, etc.) have an “LIS logo” that people can click on and get right back to the LIS home page. One way this might work is to have an LIS banner image on all of these sites (imagine this said LIS instead of CTLR in the banner: http://middlebury.babywhale.net/academics/ctlr/nojuice.php), but we haven’t come to any firm decisions on this yet.
We also looked at search statistics which showed the LIS is one of the most popular search terms year-round and was the #1 search term for both September and October in 2008. For this reason, when you type “lis” into the search box on our new site, we’re going to bring you right to the new LIS home page which will have aggregated content from this blog as well as the hours of all our locations (Library hours are the most popular page on our site) and many other content regions. Check out the wireframe that Doreen and Jeff have worked on to illustrate this: https://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/wiki/LIS/Image:Lis_landing_page.jpg